


Gun, With Occasional Hella

by orphan_account



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Kinda, pricefield
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-15 09:04:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 35,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5779810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2013, Chloe Price's life was saved by an old friend.  In 2018, Chloe's in Arcadia Bay... and in a whole mountain of trouble on both sides of the law.</p><p>Our two heroines come across a treasure trove of clues while a memory from another timeline threatens to tear Chloe in half in CHATER 15: RECOLLECTIONS OF AMERICAN RUST.  Available now.</p><p>This story has now been orphaned.  Apologies for the inconvenience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This Fixes Everything

**Author's Note:**

> Previously published at FF-dot-net, I'm bringing the party over here to the fine folks at AO3. Why didn't I bring it over here to begin with? The only reason that matters: I am extremely new at this, and didn't know this place was a place until I was five chapters deep. I didn't want to drop five chapters on you at once, so I opted to wait until I was done before bringing my decidedly meager talents to South Beach. Sorry about that.
> 
> I will say this, though. The AO3 version will be "The Enhanced Edition." What does that mean? Fewer typos and more fluid prose. What that means will vary from person to person, but it's the least I could do to say, yet again, sorry it took so long.
> 
> As of this writing (January 21, 2016), I'll drop the first two chapters today, and a new one every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Oh, and there's a playlist/soundtrack for the story on my profile. if you're into that sort of thing. I've noticed a lot of people are.
> 
> But enough of my yakking. I hope you enjoy the show...

**Chapter 1: This Fixes Everything**

_October 7, 2013_

Blood pounded in Chloe's temples. The shaking, sniveling rich kid at the bathroom sink was the last obstacle between herself and freedom. The only good Arcadia Bay was the one that was behind her, and Nathan Prescott's cash could help make that happen.

"I can tell everybody Nathan Prescott is a punk-ass who begs like a little girl and talks to himself—"

Nathan whirled on her with a gun in his hand, and every last bit of confidence, brio, and grit Chloe possessed vanished in an instant.

"You don't know who the fuck I am," Nathan said, "or who you're messing around with!"

"Where'd you get that?" Chloe asked, unable to keep the tremble out of her voice. The fear and rage coming off of Nathan had and an actual smell to it, like if cheap after-shave could spoil like mayonnaise. "What are you doing? Come on, put that down!"

Nathan advanced on her and put the gun to her gut. The situation had escalated so quickly that Chloe was too shocked to even try to push him away.

"Don't _ever_ tell me what to do! I am so _sick_ of people trying to control me!"

Chloe's mind scrambled after the control she had over the situation not a moment earlier. "You are going to get in hella more trouble for this than drugs—"

"Nobody would ever even _miss_ your punk ass, would they?"

Her brain went on the fritz, hopping from higher unanswered questions to lower base emotions, trying to latch onto something, _anything_ that could get her out of this. Her arms, independent from her thoughts, summoned strength to try to push him away

"Get that gun away f—"

A click, ordinary in any other surrounding, was amplified by the acoustics of the bathroom. A brief flash of light was accompanied by the sound of a small, whirring rotor.

Nathan spun around and the gun went off. At Nathan's mental competency hearing a month later in Portland, Chloe testified under oath that she did not know whether or not the act was intentional.

The bullet tore through the upper chest of a girl Chloe didn't recognize, pushing her against the bathroom wall, before finding its home in the plaster behind her. A spatter of blood stretched out behind her as she dropped the Polaroid camera she was holding. The girl absently put her left hand to the entry wound that was rapidly ruining her pink shirt and gray hoodie.

Nathan dropped the gun and put his hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and steadily tearing from shock. Chloe looked from him to the still-standing girl at the bathroom wall. This moment afforded Chloe a shock of recognition. The bangs covering her rather prominent forehead were different, but she instantly recalled the girl's blue eyes and freckles from a halcyon past before her life turned to shit.

_"Max?"_

Max Caulfield looked from the blood seeping between the fingers of her left hand to Chloe.

"Hey, Chloe," she said, before sliding to the floor, leaving a painterly streak of blood on the wall.

Chloe's legs moved for her. Her hand reached into her jacket for her phone of its own free will. Her fingers dialed 911. Her mouth summoned paramedics. But her mind was alight with two words warped into one, their six letters infinite: _ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit…_

Her free hand pressed down on Max's entry wound, and Chloe was only aware that she was yelling at emergency service on her phone when Max raised her right, non-bloody hand to Chloe's cheek, silencing her. Chloe's eyes went from Max's blood to Max's face.

She was _smiling._

The smile was no less sweet than if her teeth had not been pink from the blood rushing into her mouth. And her _eyes._ Those blue, rapidly dimming eyes held triumph, as though she had duped the Grim Reaper into maneuvering himself into checkmate. If Chloe didn't know any better (and Chloe had her days where she had to admit she didn't), she would have sworn it was the look of a girl in love.

But that smile slackened. Those eyes rolled back. That hand fell to the bathroom floor with a limp thud.

* * *

The shooting of a young woman by the scion of a town's wealthiest family will invariably send said town into a flurry of activity. The shooting of Max Caulfield by Nathan Prescott in Arcadia Bay was no different. A string of events occurred in the wake of that shooting, some great and some small. But they all changed Arcadia Bay forever.

At 2:05 PM that day, a Monday, after paramedics had left the scene, Nathan Prescott was marched through the front doors of Blackwell Academy in handcuffs, accompanied by arresting officer Detective Armand DiCicco, and two uniformed officers who attempted to stem the tide of students and faculty (and one reporter from the _Arcadia Bay Beacon_ ) from crowding the scene. In the encroaching chaos surrounding Nathan Prescott's perp walk, no one had noticed that the school's photography teacher, Mark Jefferson, had made his way to the parking lot.

At 3:32 PM, after finger-printing, mug shots, and the confiscation of contraband by the officers on duty, Nathan Joshua Prescott, with his attorney present, confessed to the shooting of Maxine Caulfield and the attempted murder of Chloe Elizabeth Price. The latter charge was aided by a photograph from Caulfield's Polaroid camera (which did not break upon impact with the bathroom floor) that depicted Prescott holding a gun to the stomach of the clearly distressed Price. In exchange for leniency, Prescott also confessed to the accidental death of one Rachel Dawn Amber, age 18, missing since April of that year. Nathan provided the location of Amber's corpse, as well as the location of a place he called _"The Dark Room,"_ where he alleged that he conducted acts of unlawful imprisonment and sexual assault under the tutelage of Mark Jefferson, age 46.

At 6:01 PM, Detective DiCicco and Nathan Prescott, accompanied by a forensics team that had come down from Eugene, arrived at the American Rust Junkyard on the outskirts of Arcadia Bay where, in accordance with Prescott's statements that afternoon, they found the remains of Rachel Amber. DiCicco informed Amber's parents, Lucinda and Donovan, in person at 7:22. At 8:38, Lucinda Amber took it upon herself to call Chloe Price and inform her of the tragic event. They were on the phone for three hours.

At 9:05 PM, SWAT team members converged on a barn in the woods some miles outside Arcadia Bay. After finding the entrance passage and using the door code provided by Nathan Prescott in his statement to police, they found it abandoned, but stocked with canned goods and equipped with an amateur photography studio. They also found red binders full of photographs of clearly drugged young women posed in a provocative and suggestive manner. A member of the team, Sergeant George Naffit, stated at Prescott's mental competency hearing the following month that _"I've been to murder scenes that didn't make me as sick as those pictures did."_ Among the victims whose photographs the binders contained were the now deceased Rachel Amber, as well as one Kate Beverly Marsh, age 18, who had gained some level of local notoriety in recent days due to a video that had gone viral.

At 7:00 AM the following morning, the website for the _Arcadia Bay Beacon_ updated to coincide with print copies hitting stands. The shooting of Max Caulfield, and the discovery of both Rachel Amber's corpse and The Dark Room made the front page. When reached for comment, Sean Prescott (the head of the Prescott Foundation, CEO of Prescott Development, and donor to Blackwell Academy) had his PR department issue a statement that included both support for his son, and faith in a justice system that would see the truth come to light. Behind closed doors, however, Prescott began the slow and quiet process of moving the liquid assets of Prescott Development out of Arcadia Bay.

At 2:04 PM, after delivering her statement to the ABPD, Kate Marsh was stirred from her attempt at a nap by a knock at her dorm room door. She answered to find Victoria Chase standing in the hallway, her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were ringed and set deep into her skull, as though she hadn't been sleeping. She refused to make eye contact. Kate, clearly seeing that Victoria was troubled, placed her hand on Victoria's arm and asked what the matter was. It was at this point that Victoria's eyes finally met Kate's, and she promptly burst into tears, saying _"I am_ so _sorry,"_ before Kate ushered her into her dorm room. It was there that Victoria confessed to posting the video of Kate at a Vortex Club party. Upon finding out about The Dark Room, and the actions taken there by both her best friend and the man she had strong feelings for, she had come to the conclusion that Kate had not, in fact, been drunk, but had instead been drugged and taken advantage of. And had she known, she wouldn't have posted the video and would have done something to help her. But following this train of thought, she realized that even if Kate had _not_ been drugged, she should have done those things anyway. _"I don't want to be the kind of person that makes me,"_ Victoria told Kate before a fresh round of sobbing. The two talked for some time.

At 3:43 PM, bail for Nathan Prescott was set at one-point-five million dollars. Said bail was posted almost immediately, via a check from the Prescott Foundation.

At 12:11 PM the next day, a Washington Highway Patrol officer attempted to pull over a truck that had been reported stolen. Upon hearing sirens, the truck sped up, leading the officer on a high speed chase, which lasted roughly five minutes before the truck rolled after a reckless turn. The officer apprehended the truck thief (dazed, but still alive), and found him to be Mark Jefferson, who was wanted down in Oregon in connection with a murder and a string of sexual assaults. Grand theft auto (as well as possession of an unregistered firearm, as a search of the truck revealed) was just more to add to the pile.

At 1:59 PM, Sean Prescott's legal team met in a conference room at Pan Estates in the woods at the edge of Arcadia Bay. It was agreed upon that the team would enter an insanity plea on behalf of Nathan Prescott. Doctor William J. Denton (known in publishing and syndicated radio circles as _"Dr. Bill"_ ) was set to testify for the defense.

* * *

The funeral was on Friday.

Chloe drove to the cemetery by herself, dressed in a suit that she had assembled piecemeal from thrift store visits over a period of months. Every once in a while, she set some money aside to maintain it: a crisply ironed black button-up shirt, black trousers with creases so well-defined they could saw through old cheese, a black blazer. And the cool thing was, they went with her favorite pair of boots. The top of her brain didn't know why she had collected this suit, but the bottom did: if the worst came to pass, this is the suit she wanted to be buried in.

She just didn't know she had to bury someone while wearing it.

The closest friends of the deceased showed up, which in this case, meant just about everyone in town under the age of twenty. There were some that Chloe knew face to face: Justin Williams, for one, the skater kid that was trying his damnedest to hide the thing he had for her, and Kate Marsh for another, whom she'd known since they were kids growing up in The Bay, before her whack-job religious parents moved her out of town. There were some she knew by reputation, as Rachel had told her months ago that one could always spot Victoria Chase both by the upturned nose, trying to detect the scent of her own shit which _,_ paradoxically, did  _not_ stink, and by the two drones following her. And there was one person she'd met just the other day: a dweeby-cute kid named Warren Graham, whom she had bumped into at the gas station a couple of blocks away from her house, when she took a break from long crying jags in her bedroom to buy cigarettes.

Chloe took her spot between her mother Joyce (who'd spent the last four days hovering near her at a safe distance to accommodate any need she might have) and her stepfather David (who'd made just one shitty face when he found out that Chloe was wearing a suit to the funeral instead of a dress, but other than that, had shown a sympathy and sweetness that she was shocked to find he was capable of). The pastor, who Chloe took a small portion of time away from being heartbroken to note resembled that guy from _Curb Your Enthusiasm_ , began his eulogy.

His words entered one of Chloe's ears, and the mangled corpses of said words exited the other. She didn't give a single shit about what the pastor had to say when the God he represented saw fit to make the day so fucking _sunny._ Chloe had never given much thought to whether God existed or not, but she would now conjure Him from whole cloth just to pick a fight. _I want fog, you asshole! I want rain, I want locusts, I want some sign that your almighty ass is sorry for killing my friend!_

And with that, almost on cue, a single drop of rain fell on Chloe's boot. She looked up. No other rain came. Lesser events in the course of history made believers out of many, but those many were not Chloe Price. If anything, that solitary blot of precipitation just made her angrier.

_That's it?_

And with that, the levees Chloe had so painstakingly erected within herself to avoid showing weakness in public burst. Her face reddened and the love, anger, and grief flowed from her: from her mouth in an almost silent hiss, from her eyes in scalding tears, from her very essence. David put his arm around her shoulders. Joyce held her hand.

Chloe was the last to leave the cemetery. She stood before the gravestone in silence. She scanned her memory and found she hadn't spoken a word all day. Even the friends she had at the funeral knew to avoid her on this, of all days. And in a way, she was glad. Chloe was capable of, and prided herself on her ability to, talk a mile of shit. But Friday, October 11th, 2013 was the day she fell silent. To Chloe, there was no greater sign of respect or love than that her words should fail her.

She spared the words on the gravestone one more glance before leaving the cemetery.

_RACHEL DAWN AMBER_  
_1995-2013  
_ _Dear Friend and Beloved Daughter_

* * *

Chloe stood in a hospital room and looked down at the comatose form of Max Caulfield. She was hooked up to a heart rate monitor, she was being fed intravenously, she had that… that _plastic tube_ thing in her nose.

She made her way from the funeral, directly to the hospital. This had been her fifth visit in as many days, and on this day she bumped into two blandly attractive people in their forties on their way out of Max's room. As hugs were exchanged, it amused Chloe somewhat that in spite of the general punk rock fuck-offishness she had adopted in the past five years, and in spite of their insistence that she do so, she could never bring herself to refer to these two as _"Ryan and Vanessa."_ She could be the reincarnation of a bloody-minded Viking princess, and they'd still be _"Mister and Missus Caulfield."_

She pulled up a cheaply made and poorly padded wooden chair, and sat to ponder the girl before her. Her face held affection, yes, but a trace of confusion as well, and a more than detectable trace at that. The thought on Chloe Price's mind was singular and clear:

_What does this mean?_

Since Monday afternoon, Chloe had conducted a fierce and uncompromising moral inventory, and found that several of the things she took to be evident truths about herself had been proven wrong by the simple act of Max taking a picture and getting shot for her trouble.

On Monday morning, Chloe _knew_ that no one gave a shit about her. Max got shot, and now David and Joyce had formed a loving cocoon around her.

On Monday morning, Chloe would have stopped at nothing to find out what happened to Rachel. Max got shot, and now she knew, as horrible as that truth had been.

On Monday morning, Chloe _knew_ that everyone and everything she had liked or loved in this world would leave her. Her father and Rachel had been the most notable examples. Hell, even her cat Bongo when she was fourteen. Now? Her life had been saved, a few more years added to her clock by the one person she had ever known to leave… and then _come back._

She couldn't go on the way she had been. That much was clear. She couldn't, and still maintain the illusion that she was honest with herself. Chloe Price had, not just a new lease on life, but a new lease on a _better_ life.

So… why didn't she feel any better? Why did the anger she had cultivated for so long not wither away and die, but instead crouch on the rear of her brain, waiting?

In that talk with Warren at the gas station, as Chloe smoked near the ice machine and he watched her do so, he said that Max wasn't a jump-in-front-of-a-bullet kind of girl. Chloe hadn't seen her in five years, so she had to rely on Warren's word that she hemmed and hawed over every little thing, from the photos for that son-of-a-bitch Jefferson's class, to what movie she wanted to watch at a given moment. _"It was like she went into that bathroom one person, and came out a completely different one,"_   Warren had said. _"It just goes to show."_

It certainly did.

The Second Coming of Max Caulfield had been a miracle, admitted to and sanctified by a girl who didn't believe in them. The time and place that Max had chosen to reappear in her life had been so right that it bordered on the suspicious.

Look of affectionate puzzlement still firmly in place, she leaned over and took Max's hand in her own. She was looking out the window when the comatose Max's hand squeezed Chloe's fingers and her eyes fluttered beneath her eyelids.

_Of course,_ Chloe thought. _This is Arcadia Bay. Miracles happen all the time here. You mean you didn't_ know?


	2. With Rude Wit

**Chapter 2: With Rude Wit**

_November 2, 2018_

Lenny Diehl sat at a booth in the Two Whales Diner, stealing glances at the locale in between bouts of nursing his cup of coffee. He was supposed to meet his contact here at ten, which screwed him royally, as his job at the Leonard International freight depot required he get up at four.

He shared the diner with but one soul: a waitress whose nametag helpfully informed him was Vivian.

Vivian, a woman in her late twenties, sauntered up to Lenny's booth, wiping a stray lock of red hair out of a baggy green eye. She came to a stop and pushed a hip out, too unimpressed to be annoyed.

"We're closing," Vivian said. "On your bike, I gotta lock up."

Lenny didn't deal with dismissiveness well, and dismissive women baffled him somehow further. "Um… I'm sorry, but I'm supposed to meet someone here…"

Vivian rolled her eyes. "Shit… Well, I'm leaving."

"Just like that? Aren't you supposed to…"

"I know who you're here for," Vivian said. _"She'll_ lock up."

And with that, Lenny watched Vivian take Lenny's coffee cup and disappear into a back room behind the counter. As the clock struck ten, Vivian came back out again, a long blue coat covering her uniform. She left a set of keys on the counter and exited the diner, oblivious to Lenny's gaze. As soon as the door closed, he heard the waitress talk to someone just outside.

"Don't fuckin' smoke in there."

"Yeah, yeah," said a female voice.

"And tell Joyce I deserve a raise."

"Tell her yourself."

The door to the Two Whales opened and someone went directly to the counter, picking up the keys Vivian left, and snatching a coffee cup from the rack near the _"Welcome to Arcadia Bay"_ postcard display.

This someone was tall, taller than Lenny was, a good five nine. He would have assumed this someone was a male someone, until they turned around and he saw the smoothness of her face. She wore baggy jeans over brown boots. An old olive green Army fatigue jacket (no doubt bought at a thrift store, or an Army/Navy surplus joint) was draped on her skinny frame over a black t-shirt with a circled letter in Japanese over the word _"CHIKARA,"_ whatever the hell that meant. She wore a black beanie, from under which tendrils of strawberry blonde hair fell. Wire-frame glasses punctuated a pair of beautiful blue eyes.

"You Chloe Price?" Lenny asked.

"I am," Chloe said as she sat in the booth across from Lenny and put the coffee cup down in front of her. She produced a partially flattened pack of Parliament Lights from her jacket, along with a cheap orange lighter.

"Didn't Vivian tell you not to smoke in here?"

"Vivian tells me lots of things," Chloe said, after she exhaled a jet of gray smoke in the air over the both of them. She flicked a few particles of excess ash into the coffee cup. "I might just start listening to her one day, if she's a good little girl who says her prayers. Now… you have a problem."

"Yeah."

"You told Pete abut this problem."

"Uh-huh."

"And Pete told me. Now I want you to tell me."

"But if Pete told you…"

"Pete's Pete. You're you. Tell me."

Lenny squared himself in the booth, gaining physical momentum for a verbal act.

"It was, uh… it was a poker game."

Chloe smiled, as though she's heard similar tales before. "A poker game."

"Yeah."

"When?"

"Um… Saturday."

"You bet something you didn't want to bet, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Which was?"

"It was, uh…" Lenny said, trying to physically dissolve into himself from the embarrassment. "It was a watch."

"Must be a special watch, if you can't buy another. If you need me to get it back for you."

"It was my dad's watch."

Chloe raised her eyebrows in the kind of mild surprise that accompanies learning of a politician doing something particularly nasty; a manner of a surprise at the surprise. "You bet your father's _watch?"_

"Yeah," Lenny said. "I thought my hand was hot. I had a Full House. How was I supposed to know he had four Jacks?"

"Your father still with us?" Chloe asked.

"No," Lenny said. "He passed from leukemia a year ago."

"Jesus," Chloe said. "This tells me a lot about you."

It didn't occur to Lenny to get upset at that. It told him a lot about himself, too.

"Now this watch," Chloe said, flicking more ash into the coffee cup. "Can you put a dollar amount on it?"

"Well," Lenny said, "it wasn't really an expensive watch, it's more a…"

Chloe rolled her eyes. "What I _mean_ is, how much are you gonna pay me to get it back for you?"

"Oh," Lenny said. He hadn't gotten this far in his plan to get the watch back. "I got two hundred in savings."

"Then two hundred's what I get."

"Any chance I can get it down to one-fifty?"

"No. Who has it?"

"Guy named Dalton Folger. He works at the depot with me."

Chloe nodded. "I'll find him. Have it for you tomorrow. I want the money in cash. No check."

"Look," Lenny said. "Um… I don't mean to offend you…"

_"'He said before offending me.'"_

That threw Lenny off, but only for a bit. "This guy Dalton. He's real big. Real scary. I just don't see how a girl like you is gonna get it back from him."

Chloe took a drag from her smoke and smiled. Lenny had seen that smile before on the faces of numerous girlfriends immediately after he'd said something monstrously stupid.

"I had an ex-girlfriend," Chloe said. "She told me that everyone has a gift in life. My gift was that I could get to know people without becoming friends with them. See, with most people, it's an all-or-nothing proposition, but not with me. The longer I live, the more I see how right she was."

"Yeah?" asked Lenny. "What was her gift?"

"Photography," Chloe said. "Dalton most likely wants something. I can most likely get it for him. You get your watch, I get the money and another customer on top of it. The web gets tighter and the world keeps spinning."

Chloe extinguished her cigarette in the coffee cup, folded her hands in front of her, and looked at Lenny dispassionately.

"You'll have your watch tomorrow. Get your money ready. Now go. I gotta lock up."


	3. A Lively Sense of the Grotesque

**Chapter 3: A Lively Sense of the Grotesque**

The Arcadia Bay of 2013 was a town on the ropes. Fishing was the quaint coastal hamlet's primary industry, a venture made rather difficult by the fish disappearing from the town's waters. The lack of fish meant the canneries in the local unincorporated townships closed. Good people lost their jobs, others moved away while they still had the money to do so, and property values plummeted. That last one benefited no entity in Arcadia Bay, save one: Prescott Development. Sean Prescott's business concern swooped in and bought property around town cheap, and it was theorized that Prescott was planning to remake the town in his own image, turning it into a resort destination for the hyper-rich, with Pan Estates leading the vanguard.

This never came to pass. Any hopes Sean Prescott had of mutating Arcadia Bay into the oft locally feared _"Prescott Bay"_ died when his son Nathan shot Max Caulfield in the girls' bathroom of Blackwell Academy on October 7th of that year. Any further purchases of property, the Prescott Development board of directors surmised, would result in protests, and any sales of property to outside businesses would be met with the same. Arcadia Bay became a poor investment, and Prescott put all properties (including Pan Estates) back on the real estate market at heavily discounted prices.

So how did a town that was dying in 2013 become a town that was in the middle of an unprecedented boom in 2018? Well, there are two answers to that question.

The first is that someone did eventually buy the property Prescott put up for sale: a Washington State conglomerate out of Issaquah that went by the name of Leonard International. Protests by the Arcadia Bay citizenry were quashed before they began by the one word that truly mattered in the bruised and battered town: _Jobs._ Fishing was out and, under Leonard International, shipping was in. The American Rust Junkyard was flattened and turned into a freight depot to take advantage of the nearby railroad. Docks and marinas were re-purposed into truck stops that accommodated all of the shipments entering and leaving Arcadia Bay. Those on the fence about leaving stayed. Those who didn't want to leave came back. And everyone made money.

The second, and less likely, was the result of a sizable tourism trade brought about almost entirely by the works of Kate Bradford. Bradford, a local girl, wrote her first children's book in 2016, and her second in 2017, and both broke every sales metric on record. An overblown _New Yorker_ profile credited the twenty-three-year-old Bradford as _"The Woman Who Saved Print Media."_    Both of Bradford's books were set in an idyllic fictional version of Arcadia Bay, and this brought families to the town. Indeed, tourism became so robust that a motel and a hotel were erected within the city limits.

Arcadia Bay has an Embassy Suites, now. Good for them.

But with a town's growth comes a town's growing pains. A pitfall of any shipping community is that with all the cargo coming and going, illegal narcotics can be found in a number of shipments that many would find surprising. In the days of its bust (shortly before the boom brought about by Leonard International), the town's sole drug kingpin was a man named Frank Bowers, who left town sometime during the week after the funeral of Rachel Amber, never to be seen in Arcadia Bay again. Those who wished to locally deal some of the drugs that came into Arcadia Bay found a power vacuum waiting to be filled.

But any underworld is a dramatic production, with big divas, small extras, and myriad players in between. All these factors don't play well with each other, and they are in need of people who can act as go-betweens. They are in need of people who can find things and individuals that don't want to be found. They are in need of people of grit and discretion.

In short, they are in need of people like Chloe Price.

Chloe stayed in Arcadia Bay until the summer of 2014, when she left in a cloud of mystery to parts unknown (Seattle, some said, though none could for sure). In a no less equal cloud of mystery, she came back to Arcadia Bay in the spring of 2015, her hair only blue on its fringes, as she had opted to let it grow back to its natural strawberry blonde.

She had already known the denizens of Arcadia Bay that its upper and working classes wished to forget existed, and when new lowlifes rolled in, she was in a position to be friendly, but not to make friends. Favors were asked, money changed hands, and that is how Chloe Price made her living in 2018. For the record, she put _"Freelance Consultant"_ on her taxes. No one from the IRS came knocking on her door, so she supposed it must have been true.

The record should also show that Frank Bowers never did collect Chloe's three-thousand dollar debt.

* * *

Chloe rolled The Beast into the parking lot of the Woodlawn Apartments at a quarter to eleven. She put it in park, and felt the truck cough and sputter underneath her. The Beast, a savagely beaten truck from a time before the earth cooled, was the first and, to date, only method of conveyance that she had ever owned. Getting rid of it would mean getting rid of the fading (but still visible) graffiti in its cab, left by Rachel Amber during her time on this earth. Old feelings died hard.

She stopped only to silently heap some scorn on the sign advertising the Woodlawn Apartments, which was a shitty building on a shitty block that had no lawn and was nowhere near any woods. She entered the piss-smelling lobby and ascended a single flight of stairs to apartment 205, the living space of Dalton Folger.

Where Lenny Diehl saw Dalton as a big scary black dude, Chloe (who had known him for about a year) saw him as a teddy bear who doted on his cat and who, Chloe had no doubt, would have given Lenny's watch back to him free of charge once he knew what was up.

Chloe didn't think Lenny needed to know this.

"His father's _watch?"_ Dalton asked as he was collecting stray cat toys off of his living room's burgundy carpet. "Who _does_ that shit?"

"Your boy Lenny, apparently."

"Lenny's not my boy," Dalton said. "I don't even think he's his mother's boy. Twitchy little motherfucker."

Chloe nodded. "Like he's trying to ignore a rash that isn't there?"

"Yeah," Dalton said, smiling. "He'll jump if you fart loud enough."

Chloe imagined this and smiled herself.

"So," she said. "Let's talk bidness. May I have the watch, please?"

Dalton looked at Chloe and squinted, not saying anything. If the gears turning in Dalton's head were any squeakier, Chloe reckoned she'd have to apply the oil herself.

"If you do me a favor," Dalton said.

"You know I don't work cheap," Chloe said.

"It's a small one."

"There _are_ no small ones."

"I'm having a problem with my weed dealer," Dalton said.

"Yeah?" Chloe asked. "What kind of problem?"

"I don't know where the fuck he is. He's not answering his phone, and he's not texting me back. I need you to check up on him."

"That's it? Just see where he is?"

"I'm _sensitive,"_ Dalton said. "I _care_ about people."

"And he deals cheaply, I guess?"

Dalton smiled again. "You know me too well."

Chloe scratched a little bit of the forehead under her beanie. "I dunno," Chloe said. "I don't work after midnight. You know the rules. Namely that that's the only one."

"You mean you need more enticement than the watch?"

"You know me," Chloe said. "I like my clients separate. You weave that shit together too much, you can't keep anything straight. Yeah, Dalton, I need some enticement."

"Tell you what," Dalton said. "He owes me a nickel-bag from when I helped hook up his stereo. It's yours if you do this for me."

"Deal," Chloe said. "What's his name?"

"Justin Williams."

Chloe's eyebrows raised. _"Damn."_

"You know him?" Dalton asked. "What'm I saying. Chloe, you know _everybody."_

"Yeah, but I know Justin from when we were kids."

"Hmm," Dalton said. "From back in the day?"

"Before The Bay was The Bay, yeah. Even had a thing for me, if you can believe that."

This seemed to amuse Dalton a great deal. _"Reeeeeeally?_ He know he was barking up the wrong tree?"

"Eventually," Chloe said.

"He cool about it?"

"Yeah," Chloe said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I suppose he was."

* * *

And to think the evening had started out so G-rated. Or at least as G-rated as Chloe's life ever got. Find a doofus' watch. Check.

So of course, drugs and drug dealers had to be involved eventually. To work under the radar in Arcadia Bay, as Chloe did, the moving, stopping, buying, selling, and trading of drugs was a fact of life. The only tenet of her working existence that put her on the side of the angels (in her eyes, at least) was that Chloe never dealt any of the shit herself.

Her most profitable (and time-consuming) venture in this line of work to date was playing negotiator between two outfits of coke dealers that played as though they were too hard for a sit-down. For seven hours, stretching long into the pre-dawn hours of the following morning, Chloe drove back and forth across town, ferrying offers and counter-offers to make sure the dealers had their own separate corners in their own separate parts of The Bay and no one got shot. It was because of this job that Chloe instituted the "no work past midnight" rule and kept to it.

Which wasn't to say it was all bad. She made six grand that night alone. She took a vacation in Long Beach, California with that money.

By herself.

Justin Williams lived in a ranch-style house two miles away that Chloe was surprised he could even afford, and she theorized that dealing was a job adjacent to a legitimate one for Leonard International, no doubt.

She hadn't seen Justin in years, even though their orbits were the same. She remembered the forbiddingly tall, endearingly gawky, bespectacled skater boy from their teenage days: ugly glasses beneath straw-colored hair that fought to come out from underneath a ball-cap with the same level of heroism displayed by that guy who stood in front of that tank in China. Full of bravado in front of his boys, tentative around her.

Chloe put The Beast in park by the curb in front of his house, and the truck began its bratty coughing fit. Before she left the vehicle, she reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the watch that belonged to the late father of Lenny Diehl, given unto her by Dalton Folger. It was a cheap, gold-plated Seiko with glow in the dark numbers on the face. She doubted it sold for fifty bucks back when it was new (in the eighties, probably), and she was about to pull two-hundred for it. _Life's not fair,_ thought Chloe, _and God help a great many if it ever is._

Under the amber glow of streetlight, in the unseasonably warm heat of the November evening, Chloe made her way to Justin's porch. There were no lights on in the house, save for the glow of a television through the window of what she assumed was the living room.

Chloe wondered how Justin would take this, a Ghost of Romantic Prospects Past showing up on his doorstep before midnight. Chloe had read letters that featured such instances as this. They usually began _"Dear, Penthouse Forum."_

She knocked on the door, and the contact of her fist made the unlocked door open.

A chill went through Chloe. Every movie she had ever seen that had begun with a supposedly locked door opening spelled trouble, and every last byway in her brain screamed at her to walk away, to turn tail and run. All except one, and that was the one she usually followed.

She imagined that she would not last long in a horror movie.

Canned laughter and poor dialogue echoed through Justin Williams' surprisingly tidy house. The pictures on the hallway wall were muddy and half-remembered pin-pricks of white teeth and bright eyes in the unlit interior gloom. The carpet was… beige? White? Off-white? Some other bright hue that Chloe would need the color chart from Sherwin-Williams to figure out?

She followed the pale, ghostly television light into the living room. The light, and a strange smell that Chloe found familiar, but couldn't quite place.

Justin Williams had gained weight in the years since Chloe saw him last. Not enough to call him fat, but enough to compliment his height. His hairline retreated from his forehead like the Persian army when they knew the Battle of Marathon was lost. The pitiful attempts at a mustache all those years ago were, thankfully, abandoned.

The only thing that hadn't changed about Justin was his glasses. They were still the same black, blocky monstrosities that had plagued him in his teens.

Save for the bullet hole in the left lens, of course.

Justin was on the floor, his left eye marred by an assassin's gun, blood seeping from the socket and ruining the carpet. The bit of floor underneath Justin was a splash of blood, some bone, and various assorted cranial ephemera, wreathing his head like flame wreathed the head of the Virgin Mary in renaissance paintings that she'd seen. The light from the _Three's Company_ episode on the blood-spattered flat-screen blackened the darkness of Justin's remains.

The funerals of both her father and Rachel had been closed casket affairs, so Justin Williams, age twenty-three, drew the unenviable short-straw in being the first dead body Chloe Price had ever seen.

She could not look away.

Chloe did not notice the flashing, candy-like red and blue from the lights of the incoming police cruiser outside. What broke Chloe from her horrible trance was the sound of the open front door slamming against the hallway wall. She turned to see two middle-aged representatives of Arcadia Bay's finest enter the living room, guns leveled on her.

"ABPD! Put your fucking hands behind your head and get down on the ground!"

_When you're beat,_ she thought, _you do as you're told._

Chloe's hands went up.


	4. A Disgust for Sham

**Chapter 4: A Disgust for Sham**

_November 3, 2018_

Chloe fancied herself a punk hell-raiser in her late teenage years, she of the blue hair, tats, drugs, and anger. In her mightiest of rages and lowest of funks, she felt as though she could destroy the world and flip off its smoldering ruin. There was no rule and no law she wouldn't break if that rule and that law didn't piss her off bad enough.

But it took Chloe until she was a twenty-four-year-old (somewhat) responsible adult to spend a night in jail. She was taken from the site of Justin's murder to the police station after midnight. They took her fingerprints and mugshot. They took her jacket, her belt, her shoes. They even took her glasses.

And they took the fucking _watch._

The one small blessing that Chloe could rightfully call hers was that no one else shared Arcadia Bay's one women's cell with her that night. She passed Friday night into Saturday morning in a solitude broken only by the bored-looking officers on duty.

At nine AM, a tired and weathered-looking male officer came into the cell. He gave Chloe her glasses back and escorted her to an interrogation room down the hall. The officer stood by the door for twenty minutes until the lead detective arrived, during which Chloe sat at the table and stared daggers into the two-way glass on the far wall.

The lead homicide officer was a lean man in his late-thirties: handsome and wearing a mustache in a way other men wore ceremonial swords at matters of state. He wore enough product in his slicked-back hair to lightly stain the collar of his navy blue button-down. He had the same kind of pale eyes that belonged to birds that descended from the sky upon field mice in snowy plains.

Chloe didn't think this guy was a local. She'd know if he was.

"Chloe Price," the detective said. Not asking. Stating a fact.

"And your name is…?

"Jesus… H… Christ," the detective said. "Or it might as well be. Neither of us are going to save you."

Chloe remembered Rachel telling her that, should push come to shove, one must never talk shit to a cop, and the amount of respect to show to an officer of the law went up exponentially with the severity of whatever crime they suspected one of.

There were some things Chloe and Rachel didn't see eye-to-eye on.

"Well, Detective Christ. As much as I'd just _love_ to braid your hair and talk about boys, I'm going to have to have my lawyer here before I can do that."

"Why do you need a lawyer?" the detective asked. "You wouldn't have something to hide, now, would you?"

Chloe rolled her eyes. "Don't look at me like I watch TV, alright? We could talk about whether or not that Otters are gonna make it to state this year, and I'd _still_ need my lawyer present. Anything I say or sign otherwise is done so under duress, and therefore inadmissible in an Oregon court."

The one thing Chloe had in common with the criminals in Arcadia Bay: One night looking up state and local law on the internet made them amateur lawyers.

The detective smiled and nodded. "You've done your homework. Do you have an attorney?"

 _Well,_ Chloe thought, _he's got me there._

The detective sat at the table in the metal chair across from her. "You do realize if anything you say is inadmissible, then anything _I_ say is inadmissible. It's a two-way street, you see."

The detective smiled a shark's smile, and Chloe sent up a Red Alert to the muscles in her face, ordering them not to show that pang of fear she felt.

"What we have here," the detective said, "is a dead man. Justin Williams. What we have here, is someone standing over the body. If you think we're gonna let that one go, you are sorely mistaken."

"That body was starting to stink," Chloe said. "You're telling me I shot Justin God knows when, and then came back for no apparent reason?"

"Y'know, they say murderers always return to the scene of the crime," the detective said. "You're asking me if you'd do something a murderer would do?"

The detective leaned in. "Girl, you are going to start eating shit, and you'll learn to love the t—"

The door to the interrogation room opened, and a young female officer who looked like she'd been psychically mauled by a bear poked her head in.

"Detective Finch?" the officer asked.

 _Finch,_ Chloe thought. _File that one away somewhere._

"What the fuck, Davies?" Detective Finch asked, his sheen of predatory cool cracking irreparably.

"I'm sorry," the officer said, "but there's… _some_ one here to see you.

"Alright," Finch said. "Stay here. Watch her."

Finch left, and Davies, the harried female officer came in and stood sentry by the door. Chloe listened to the mounting commotion outside the interrogation room. Finch started bellowing, but space and the walls obscured his words. But even through walls and feet of empty air, Chloe could detect an even female voice that could frost the Sahara. It was a voice that was… _kinda_ familiar.

The mad opera outside culminated with Finch yelling, loudly and clearly: _"YOU CAN'T GO IN THERE!"_

The door opened, and a woman appeared. They had never been in the same circles, but Chloe could recognize her anywhere: honey-colored hair over dark, carnivorous eyes that spelled doom and perdition to anyone who crossed their owner.

"Get up," Victoria Chase said. "We're leaving."

* * *

Chloe got her Parliaments out of her jacket and lit one, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose as she did so. Chloe and Victoria stood near the steps of the Arcadia Bay Police Department, where the ashtrays were. The sky was overcast, wanting to rain, but making a list of pros and cons before it committed.

"Your friend Dalton gave a statement at eight this morning saying that he sent you to Justin's house to check up on him," Victoria said. "Not to mention the fact that it got leaked to the _Beacon_ that there was no gun on the scene, and the arresting officers failed to do residue tests on your hands to see if you'd fired a gun recently." Victoria looked at Chloe. "They couldn't have done anything to you if they wanted to."

"Who leaked all this to the paper?"

"It appears you have a guardian angel," Victoria said. "Someone on the ABPD has taken a shine to you, for whatever reason."

"That detective, Finch? He seemed pretty certain he could make something stick."

"I don't think Finch knew the information was public knowledge. And unless I'm mistaken, you don't have a lawyer. Any cop would be brave in the face of that. I, on the other hand, am Kate Bradford's literary agent. Her legal team is my legal team. That makes it _your_ legal team."

Chloe took a drag. "And you did all this out of the kindness of your heart?"

"No," Victoria said. "Katie asked me to."

"So _Kate Marsh_ did this out of the kindness of her heart?"

"Bradford," Victoria said. "And no. A favor was asked, and Katie is nothing if not accommodating to her friends."

"Who asked this favor?"

Victoria looked at Chloe as though she'd whiffed the easy opening question on a quiz show. "Who do you _think?"_

The temperature of Chloe's face rose ten degrees while it dropped forty degrees everywhere else. Victoria dug Chloe's keys out of her purse.

"Here," Victoria said, handing the keys to Chloe. "I got that thing you call a truck out of impound for you. Have a nice day. Call me never."

Victoria had gotten a few more steps toward the parking lot before Chloe called out to her.

"If you're so high-powered, what are you still doing in Arcadia Bay? I mean, even Kate moved to New York."

Victoria turned and fixed Chloe with a glare.

"Because I love my husband," Victoria said, and walked away.

* * *

The rest of Chloe's day was a busy one. The first stop was the Two Whales, where Vivian fixed her with a dirty stare as Chloe gave Lenny Diehl his watch back, and picked up her two hundred in cash. She stuffed her four fifties into her jacket pocket and left. The exchange took two minutes.

The next bit of business, once she got back to her apartment (in the Blue Cove Apartments, the less classy of Arcadia Bay's two apartment complexes), was to call Dalton. She had planned to be calm and rational in her questioning about the coincidence of Dalton sending Chloe to the house of a dead man, but what came out was:

_"Did you set me up?"_

"Chloe," Dalton said. "If I was gonna set you up, why would I call the cops to tell them I sent you there?"

He had a point. The rest of the conversation consisted of Dalton asking her about other, reasonably-priced weed hook-ups.

Chloe showered, and came out of the bathroom in a pair of blue sweatpants, a plain gray tank-top, and her glasses. She went to her bedroom to light up the ceramic skull bong she got in Long Beach when there was a knock on the apartment door.

It was Trevor Cade.

Much like a Civil War that pits brother against brother, so life visited a similar fate upon former skate-homies Trevor Cade and Justin Williams.

Justin Williams became a pot dealer.

Trevor Cade became a cop.

"You're the one who leaked the info about my arrest to the paper," Chloe said, in lieu of a hello.

"Yeah," Trevor said. "Can I come in?"

He could. They sat at Chloe's cluttered kitchen table. She dug an almost spent bottle of rum and a can of Pepsi out of the fridge, which they mixed and split. They played catch-up.

"How's the wife?" Chloe asked.

"Dana? Yeah, she's good. We're, uh, we're having a baby."

"Congratulations."

Trevor smiled, but it didn't last.

 _"Not_ congratulations?" Chloe asked.

"No, not that," Trevor said, "that's great but… What happened with Justin is just fucking with me."

Chloe nodded. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"Yeah," Trevor said. "Me too. It's just… Justin had a thing for you, and I know it wouldn't have worked. For, y'know, _ob_ vious reasons. But… you made him happy all the same. I know you. I know you wouldn't have killed him. Even before the evidence, I knew."

That was the sweetest thing Chloe had heard all day. "Thanks for helping me out," she said. "But Detective Finch seemed convinced otherwise."

"He's new," Trevor said after taking a sip of his rum and Pepsi. "I don't mean new as in he just became a cop.  I mean new as in he's not from The Bay."

Trevor took another sip before thinking a second. "I worry about this place. It's like the people running this small town don't know how small towns work. I mean, all these outsiders… You need more than a hard-on and a badge to get shit done around here. You gotta know the lay of the land. You gotta… you gotta know the _ecosystem."_

Trevor finished off his drink. "Look, Chloe, I know what you do around here. I know how you make your money. Just… don't get into any trouble I can't get you out of."

Chloe walked Trevor to the door. She closed it after him. She stayed at the doorway to finish the drink in her hand when another knock came. She quickly looked into the kitchen to see if Trevor had left anything there and saw nothing.

Another knock.

Chloe set her glass down on the small table near the entryway to the kitchen and opened the apartment door.

She was still an itty little thing. From age thirteen to age twenty-three, she probably hadn't grown more than three inches in height. She still looked the same as she did in their selfies together from five years ago, but an intangible inner maturity made her seem her age somehow. She wore black slacks and dress shoes underneath a form-fitting red sweater. Her hair was in a pony-tail, and she was still pulling off those bangs. Her eyes were still as wet and blue as the Pacific, and freckles still dotted her face like landmarks on a map.

"Max?"

Chloe could see Max Caulfield trying not to smile and failing.

"Hey, Chloe."


	5. A Contempt for Pettiness

**Chapter 5: A Contempt for Pettiness**

_April 18, 2015_

"How's Portland?"

Max laughed on her end of the line. "I thought _I_ was a hipster. There's a guy who works at this gallery with, like _pig_ -tails. I mean, I'm not about gendering people, saying who can wear what, but those don't look good on _anybody."_

Chloe, in the bedroom of the Seattle apartment she shared with Max, couldn't even muster a smile. Max was in Portland, promoting a gallery exhibit of her work.

"Are you there?" Max asked.

"Yeah," Chloe said.

"I thought you'd laugh at the dude in pig-tails."

Under normal circumstances, Chloe would have.

"Are you okay?" Max asked. "You're being kinda… I dunno…"

"I'm not feeling all that well," Chloe said. Which was true, just not for reasons she was willing to admit. Least of all to Max.

"Oh, poor baby," said Max. "Is it your stomach? Did you go back to that pho place? It doesn't agree with you."

"No, I… It's just kind of a general… head… thing."

"Okay," Max said. "I'll be back tomorrow night. I'll take care of you.  _So much_ chicken noodle soup."

"You baby me," Chloe said.

"My nurse game is strong," Max said, and Chloe could hear the smile on her girlfriend's lips.

"I love you," Max said.

"I love you too." For the first time, those words tasted funny on Chloe's tongue.

Chloe hung up and looked around the bedroom. Max Caulfield and Chloe Price came to Seattle in the summer of 2014. Their first two months in the jewel of Washington State were spent in the residence of Ryan and Vanessa Caulfield, who were so appreciative of Chloe's support during Max's coma, and so bewildered by their daughter's stunning display of bravery on that Monday the previous October, that they had no problem letting Chloe stay underneath their roof.

Being that the Caulfields let Chloe sleep in Max's room, both girls thought it advantageous not to let Ryan and Vanessa know that they were a couple until after they'd moved out.

The plan was that Max and Chloe would find an apartment in Seattle, with a little help from Mister and Missus Caulfield, where Max would attend the University of Washington.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the autumn of 2014: it seemed that when an artist gets press exposure (like, say, a piece on CNN about that artist getting shot in a bathroom by the richest kid in a small town), demand for that artist's work increases. The art world of the Pacific Northwest had learned the name of Max Caulfield, and she negotiated her first gallery showing while she was still in the hospital recovering from her coma. The public received her work warmly. So warmly, in fact, that Max neither needed her parents' help, nor had the necessity for a college education. The eighteen-year-old Caulfield could live off the prints being made of her work, and ply her trade full time as a photographer.

After a tumultuous two days of back and forth between Max and her parents, where the latter insisted upon a college education for their daughter, Ryan and Vanessa finally caved, and Max and Chloe found a small, reasonably-priced apartment in mid-town. Chloe supplemented the couple's income working IT for a small software company, where she learned something about herself that would serve her well over the next four years: that she could be nice to anyone, provided they paid for the privilege.

Chloe looked around the bedroom. Their life had been comfortable and warm. Max still had the teddy bear with the missing eye from her childhood, sitting on a small shelf above the bed they shared. Max was the kind of lovably sentimental dork that would frame their senior prom picture: Max in a gray silk dress that showed off her shoulders and the entry wound from the bullet high up on the left side of her chest, as well as the starfish-shaped exit wound in the middle of her shoulder blade (as Max said that when people saw her scars she felt braver). Chloe was in a dark blue suit and white shirt that Max helped her buy, because she refused to go to prom in the suit she buried Rachel in.

And that life, that home they had built for each other fit in the two brown suitcases at Chloe's feet. Two suitcases full of things she needed or couldn't part with.

Chloe stared at them for a while and expected an apocalypse, a cataclysm, a bolt from Zeus that told her she was being an idiot and a fool. That told her someone loving you back only comes once if you're lucky, and walking out would destroy her in ways both grand and subtle.

It never came.

Chloe picked up the suitcases and left the apartment.

Left Seattle.

Left Max.

* * *

_November 3, 2018_

"You wear glasses now," Max said.

Chloe snapped out of it. "Yeah," she said. "It, um… it happens."

 _"It happens?"_ Chloe thought. _Speak English, dumbass._

"Did you see Trevor?" Chloe asked.

"Yeah," Max said, shuffling her feet and looking down the hallway where Trevor would have gone after he'd left. "He said _'good luck.'"_

They fell into an awkward pause so deep that there were ugly, glow-in-the-dark fish at the bottom of it.

"Are, uh… are we gonna have our conversation out here?" Max asked. "I mean, I don't _mind,_ if that's how you want to do it, but I really would like to come in."

Chloe stepped aside, and Max entered Chloe's apartment. Chloe saw Max survey the apartment's shabby interior, with its pitted wooden floors, its ugly green rugs, its mismatched furniture, its thin layer of dust. She scanned Max for any sense of pity or derision and found none. She had always seemed to accept Chloe as-is, and Chloe had had her doubts about what that meant from time to time. Like a homeless person accepting whatever donations they were fortunate enough to get.

"I just used up the last of my booze," Chloe said," but I think I have a bottle of water in the fridge…"

"No, I'm fine."

"Alright. Have a seat, Pete."

Max smiled at that. Chloe rifled through her memory to see if that was a private joke between the two of them that she'd made by accident and came up empty. Max sat on the living room recliner. Chloe sat on the couch.

"So you asked Kate Marsh to use some of her pull to get me out of jail," Chloe said.

"Bradford," Max said. "And yeah."

"You sicced Victoria Chase on the Arcadia Bay Police Department," Chloe said. "That's a war crime. The UN's gonna want to have a talk with you."

Max smiled.

"How did you even now I was there? Do you have a Google alert set up? _'Chloe Price'_ and _'arrested?'"_

"Well, I just never know with you."

Chloe smiled before she could tell herself not to. Another lull.

"Justin's dead," Max said.

"Yeah," said Chloe. "Some fucker shot him in the eye. It was…"

Max gave a grim nod, but didn't seem phased by it, which struck Chloe as odd. As though someone getting shot in the head was old hat to her ex-girlfriend. Maybe it was because Max had taken a bullet herself, but…

"Any leads?" Max asked. "Anyone you think did it?"

Chloe cocked her head to the side.

 _"Leads?_ Max, what are you talking about?"

Max looked at Chloe as though she were speaking a foreign tongue. "You're going to try to find out who did this, right?"

Chloe couldn't keep herself from letting out an astonished laugh. "No."

"Justin was your friend, and you got arrested for shooting him. Doesn't that… I dunno… piss you off?"

"Yeah, but I'm not gonna run around and start shit with the people who killed him. We have cops for this sort of thing."

"Oh," Max said, "so the cops in Arcadia Bay aren't corrupt and useless anymore?"

If anything, they were even worse, but Chloe wasn't about to tell Max that.

"Look," Chloe said. "Justin dealt. Probably did some shit he wasn't supposed to. It sucks he's dead, but I can't help that. And me getting arrested is just the cost of doing business. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner."

"What _is_ your business, precisely?

"That's… that's complicated," Chloe said. "The point I'm trying to make is that running around solving the unsolved mysteries of Arcadia Bay isn't me."

"It _was_ you," Max said.

_"When?"_

Chloe could see that Max had an answer to that, and a damned good one, but stopped herself from saying it. She slumped in the recliner.

"I got here too late," Max said, to herself as much as Chloe.

"What's that supposed to mean?

Max looked Chloe in the eye. "Someone once said that there comes a point where life stops making you angry and starts making you sad," Max said. "I never thought it would happen to you."

Chloe didn't know what to say to that.

Max got up, and Chloe did as well. Max made her way to the apartment door, but Chloe didn't follow. Before she could open the door, Max turned around.

"Why did you leave me?"

The question was so simple, so direct, so desperate, and so… _quiet_ that it gave Chloe pause.

"Why didn't you find me?" Chloe asked.

Max wiped a corner of her eye.

"Chloe, I _always_ find you. I didn't come looking because I thought maybe you'd find me. Y'know… for a _change."_

Max left the apartment without a backward glance.

* * *

Chloe broke one of Lenny Diehl's fifties at the liquor store three blocks from the Blue Cove apartments on another bottle of Captain Morgan and a six pack of Pepsi. She got home, fixed herself a drink with her newly gained provisions, got down to her t-shirt and a pair of blue boxers, lit up, and sat on her bed, staring out the window at the small, humble stretch of the town below.

Arcadia Bay had been in the business of taking things from Chloe Price. Things like family, and friends, and innocence. Back in the day, the town was like one of those vividly colored poisonous frogs in a jungle with a hard to pronounce name: lovely to behold, but lethal and brutal all the same.

Max had been the only thing she'd given up of her own free will, and that came back to haunt her as well.

But this wasn't back in the day. Then, when someone did wrong, fucked you over, then you knew their name, where they lived. They had the same friends you did, the same connections, the same roots.

But now?

 _"I worry about this place,"_ Trevor had said earlier that day, and it wasn't until now, stirred by an unrest and curiosity that was both familiar and alien, that Chloe had begun to worry, too. Arcadia Bay wasn't evolving. It was _mutating_ , being acted upon by outside influences that may or may not have anyone's best interests at heart.

Arcadia Bay may be a vile shithole, but it was _her_ vile shithole, and someone running around killing old friends like Justin Williams had, just now, at this moment, become the affront that led to war.

 _Goddammit, Max,_ Chloe thought. _Look at what you're making me do._

Chloe polished off her drink, put the glass on the nightstand, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

She'd call Trevor about the case in the morning.


	6. You Get the Horns

**Chapter 6: You Get the Horns**

_November 4, 2018_

"It's already closed," Trevor said over the phone.

Chloe leaned back in her recliner, the morning light from the far window warming everything on her face except her expression.

"What do you mean it's already closed?" she asked.

Chloe could hear Trevor shuffling the papers and folders on his desk on the other end of the line. "You ever hear of a guy named Arnold Trainor?"

"No."

"Well, you have now. A black-and-white found his car in a Best Buy parking lot last night, with him slumped over the steering wheel. One in the back of the head. He's the guy that killed Justin."

Chloe rubbed the bridge of her nose under her glasses. "How do you know this for sure?"

"There were two things on the passenger seat. One is a nine millimeter automatic with a bullet missing from the clip. We haven't run an official analysis on it yet, but Justin's autopsy shows the bullet wound could be one from a nine."

"And what's the second thing?"

"A disposable phone with only two calls placed. One's a private number we haven't been able to place yet. The other was to 911 the other night. Turns out, Trainor was the one who called the cops on you, saying someone entered Justin's house on Friday night. He called us to pin it on you."

Chloe rolled the information around in her head and leaned forward in the recliner. "It's bullshit and you know it."

A pause.

"What do you mean?" Trevor asked.

"I've seen enough movies to know it's the oldest trick in the book," Chloe said. "Say I don't like a guy named Peter. I want Peter dead. But I can't kill Peter myself, because I have motive and a bunch of evidence is gonna point to me. But I can hire a guy named Paul to do it. Paul kills Peter, Paul comes to me to get paid, I kill Paul. There's nothing linking me to Peter, and Paul is easier to worry about because he's some asshole who kills people for a living.  No one's gonna miss Paul."

"And to think that when I woke up this morning, I thought I had better things to do than listen to Chloe Price yank a conspiracy theory out of her narrow ass."

Chloe sighed her displeasure. "Justin's found murdered one night, and the next night the guy who did it turns up dead with the evidence linking him to Justin gift-wrapped in the front seat of his car? I say again, it's bullshit and you know it."

"Look," Trevor said. "The day a cop passes an open-and-shut case is the day the sun starts spinning around the earth. I can't help you. Nice try, though."

"Justin was our friend."

Another pause. "And we found the guy who killed him," Trevor said, and Chloe could tell from his voice that she had taken his goodwill past its limit. "Don't come to the funeral, Chloe. I don't want you scaring his family with this shit."

Trevor hung up, and Chloe leaned back again.

She had been told by multiple people in her life that that once she had gotten an idea in her head, she would follow it to the bitterest of bitter ends, even if that idea was wrong, and the results wound up hurting her.

That was bullshit, too. She wouldn't have gotten this far in life by accepting every easy answer that just anyone deigned to serve to her.

Chloe then stopped, and wondered just how far _"this far in life"_ actually was. Single and isolated with a job that she couldn't be honest with her mother or ex-girlfriend about, using a diner as an office because she couldn't afford one herself. A shitload of acquaintances and no friends.

"Fuck it," Chloe said, and went to get her jacket.

* * *

More than half of a decade ago, when Rachel was alive, Max was un-shot and un-disappointed in her in Seattle, and the world held a glimmer of promise, a man named Frank Bowers, under the influence of tequila, pot, and a dare, decided to teach a girl named Chloe Price how to pick locks.

As years and experience on the subject would later show, Frank Bowers did not know shit about picking locks.

When it became obvious to Chloe that, in her line of work, getting through a door that she (maybe, legally) wasn't supposed to get through might be a necessity, she turned to internet tutorials, and even bought a lockpicking kit from a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy around town.

And that's how she got into Justin's house.

She entered the hallway hoping to find… well, she didn't really know. Something? _Anything?_ Chloe was new at the whole gumshoe thing, and she figured she'd know what she was looking for when she found it.

There wasn't much in the house that wasn't picked over by Justin's family yesterday, or taken by the police as evidence the day before. She saw the tangle of cords and cables in his bedroom where his PC used to be, next to the monitor on a cheap Ikea desk. She found a stack of paycheck stubs from Leonard International in his dresser next to his socks (which was one theory she had that turned out to be correct, and gave her the confidence in whatever theory she might come up with next).

But other than the stubs, she came up with nothing. No stash of weed from his dealing enterprise, no phone she could look into, no incriminating letters or pictures, nothing to explain why he might have been murdered, or what could have connected him to Arnold Trainor. Chloe felt like a hyena, picking through a lion's sloppy seconds in the form of a gazelle that didn't have a lot of meat on its bones to begin with.

Chloe was on her way out when she stopped and looked at the pictures on the wall in the hallway.

They were all of Justin with a brunette girl his age, very pretty, with green eyes and a slender frame. Judging from how the two were posed together, it was clear they were seeing each other.

Chloe wondered if Justin had a Facebook or Twitter account, and assumed he must have. Social media accounts meant more pictures, and more pictures meant a name for the girl depicted therein. Trevor didn't want Chloe scaring the family with her theories (and in hindsight, away from the heat of the conversation, Chloe had to agree), but the girlfriend might be a different story. She might know something.

But she wasn't going to whip out her phone right here and now to start snooping around on the internet for Justin's accounts. No, she'd wait until she got home to do that.

She didn't know who might be watching.

* * *

Chloe stopped at the Two Whales to see if she had any mail delivered. She had certain things sent there, because she didn't have confidence that some of the skeezier residents of the Blue Cove apartments wouldn't steal her shit. Vivian rolled her eyes and said that nothing came.

When she got back to the Blue Cove, Chloe found an envelope taped to her door. She yanked it off, opened it, and read the letter inside...

_Dear, Chloe_  
_I'm staying in town for Justin's funeral. I'll be around, so if you see me, don't be afraid to say Hi.  
_ _-Max_

Accompanying her signature was the smiley-face Max liked to make, with the eyes too far apart and the smile a flat line.

_"Don't be afraid to say Hi,"_ wrote the girl too afraid to say Hi. Max didn't call, didn't wait, just posted a note. It wasn't like she waited by the door for Chloe, and then left the note when she had somewhere else to be. Unless she carried envelopes and tape with her everywhere she went, and who the hell did _that?_

Chloe did her best to banish these thoughts. It's not like she deserved anything better from her after bailing out three years ago. Any feelings of slight or regret were accurate mirrors of her behavior.

She entered her apartment, threw her jacket over the back of the sofa, lit a Parliament Light, and got her phone out. She was going to start with Twitter, to check on Justin's account and find the name of the Mystery Brunette, before going to Instagram, and finally, the dreaded Facebook.

Chloe hadn't even logged in when a knock came at the apartment door. Chloe stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray on the end table and made for the hallway a little too fast, hoping (a bit more than she liked) that Max had come back.

It wasn't Max.

It was two white men in their forties. The First Guy was balding and had his hair slicked back, showing pockets of scalp through reedy installations of black follicles. The Second Guy was thin, in a gray sweatshirt, black bags under brown eyes that looked like they hadn't seen sleep in the better part of a week. The Second Guy was holding a black cloth bag with nothing in it.

"You Chloe Price?" the First Guy asked.

"Who's asking?"

"A guy who wants to meet you."

"I gave at the office," Chloe said, trying to inch her way back into the apartment. "But you United Way guys, you do the Lord's work."

The First Guy opened his red leather jacket to show off the pistol holstered under his armpit.

"Lady," he said. "You mistake us for patient men."

* * *

Chloe had the black bag over her head for the entire fifteen minute car ride. The car came to a stop and she was walked by her captors through two sets of doors.

She was sat down in a chair, and the bag came off. She knew she was in an abandoned office building the second she saw the ceiling, its rows of fluorescent lights powered off. The windows were boarded up.

The only illumination was provided by a small lamp on the room's only desk, at which sat a man in his thirties with a salt-and-pepper goatee and black hair. He wore a dark pink button-down with a black tie and suspenders. The First Guy and the Second Guy were standing sentry behind her.

"You're Chloe Price," the man in the pink shirt said.

"And you are?" she asked.

He smiled. "They call me The Bull."

Chloe smirked. "Do _they_ call you The Bull? Or do _you_ call you The Bull?"

The Bull smiled. "That's cute. Friends of friends say you have a reputation for… shall we say… _hardihood."_

Chloe's smirk turned into a grin. "You have one of those Word of the Day calendars, don't you?"

The Bull smiled some more, but there was a sourness to it.

"It's cool," Chloe said. "I have the one with the _Jeopardy_ questions, myself."

The Bull opened the drawer of the desk and pulled out a snub-nose revolver that looked like it could stop an angry gorilla. This was done, Chloe guessed, in an attempt to rob her of her bravado.

If so, it was successful.

The Bull looked up at the Second Guy. "Bring him in, please."

The Second Guy departed and the room was left in silence for the minute or so until he returned...

...with Detective Finch, her would-be interrogator from the previous morning, in tow.

"What're _you_ doing here?" Chloe asked.

Detective Finch swaggered to the desk and leaned on it, looking like one of Satan's lesser imps modeling menswear for the JC Penney website.

"You've run afoul of my employer," Finch said. "Ain't that right, sir?"

The Bull nodded.

"So he's asked me here today to outline the number of ways I can make your life a living hell. You see…"

Finch didn't get to finish. The Bull picked up the revolver from the desk and fired it into the back of Finch's head. His skull did a red Jackson Pollock of bone, brain, and a fine pink mist of blood in the air in front of him as the rest of his body dropped to the floor, twitching once before it stilled.

Chloe jumped and yelled.

_"FUCK!"_

Breathing heavily, she saw The Bull put the gun back down on the desk, and scratch the side of his nose.

"That man," The Bull said, "was valuable to me. He had a wife and daughter. He was a respected member of the community. He was one of Arcadia Bay's finest… You know I'm saying this because if can do that to him, I can do that to you, right?"

"Yeah," Chloe said, her heart thudding in her chest. "Yeah, I got that."

"Good. Now a normal man, a lesser man, would tell you not to say anything about what I just did. Me? I don't give a fuck. Tell your mom, your dad, your priest, people on the street. Doesn't make a shit's worth of difference to me. Time was, a guy did what I just did to a cop, all the little piggies would get in a line with their pitchforks and torches and wouldn't stop oinking until I was dead. But not today. Not in Arcadia Bay. I put a lot of money into this town, and that includes the Police Department. What I know, and what they know, and what you're about to find out, is that any old bitch-dog, no matter how angry, will roll over if you feed her and scratch her belly. They're not gonna miss one of their own if they're being paid well enough."

The Bull sat back.

"Drugs are my trade," The Bull said, "and believe it or not, you've done work for me in the past, even though you didn't know it at the time. Where drugs are involved, favors are involved, and you're the one who does those favors. A lot of little wheels have to spin to keep my operation afloat, and I respect my little wheels, like a good entrepreneur should. In fact, the service you provide is more valuable to me than the service someone like our dearly departed friend Detective Finch would provide.  I can get me a dirty cop for a penny and a doughnut, but people like you?  People who _know_ people?  They're worth their weight in gold.  This is why I'm letting you walk out of here today. Under one condition…"

The Bull picked up the gun and pointed it at Chloe. She recoiled in her seat.

"My guys saw you going into Justin Williams' house today. I assume you got it into your head that you want to play detective? Try and find out who did what to whom?"

Chloe nodded.

"Not anymore," The Bull said. "I'm not gonna explain myself to you because I don't have to. But your curiosity will not end well. You see what happens when you mess with The Bull. You're valuable, little girl, but you're not irreplaceable."

The Bull put the gun back down on the desk and pointed to the First Guy.

"You. Take Chloe here home."

He pointed to the Second Guy.

"You," The Bull said before pointing at the dead body of Detective Finch. "Pick that shit up."

* * *

Another fifteen minute car ride, and The First Guy yanked the bag off of Chloe's head again, and she found herself in front of her apartment building. She left the First Guy's shitty mid-size without saying a word to him.

After the car pulled away, Chloe stood in front of the apartment building for a few moments in the golden glow of the pre-evening hours. Her heart was still racing, and her hands shook like leaves.

_My life has become a steady procession of people getting shot in the head,_ she thought.

As she made her way up the stairs to the third floor, she told herself she was going to let this sleeping dog lie. That Justin was a friend, but not good enough of a friend to die for. That Max's disappointment hurt, but she'd live. That she'd go back to doing favors, finding lost shit and lost people, making sure the underground of Arcadia Bay didn't spill out onto the street in the only way she knew how.

She told herself these things, but she didn't believe them.

She got to the third floor to find yet another pair of men at her apartment door, these better dressed and better groomed than the First Guy and the Second Guy. They had matching blue suits and matching crisp ties. One saw Chloe coming and elbowed the other.

"Miss Price?" the one on the left asked. "Good afternoon. Our employer would like a few minutes of your time."

Chloe couldn't keep it in.

"You have _got_ to be _fucking_ kidding me!"


	7. Arcadia Bay Nocturne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to take Fridays off, but the cliffhanger at the end of this one was just too good. Enjoy, all five of you! And see you on Monday.

**Chapter 7: Arcadia** **Bay Nocturne**

And so it came to pass that for the second time in one day, Chloe Price was taken from her doorstep by two mysterious men to meet their equally mysterious employer.

At least the two guys in suits were far, far nicer about it than the First Guy and the Second Guy had been, namely starting out by introducing themselves as Rutger and Halliwell, sparing Chloe the mental pain-in-the-ass of having to refer to them as the Third Guy and the Fourth Guy.

They let her go into her apartment to get her beanie, jacket, and a fresh pack of cigarettes.

They came in a black limo instead of a shitty, rusty mid-size, and even opened the back door for her as though they were more like chauffeurs than the shady emissaries of an enigmatic third party.

They didn't put a smelly black bag over her head, and Chloe spent the ten minute ride looking out the tinted window at all the pretty Oregon scenery that everyone but the tourists had learned to ignore.

They even let her smoke.

As the sun hid behind the trees, the limo pulled into a long gravel driveway that led up a hill to a massive, secluded house. Chloe didn't know where big houses ended and mansions started, but she reckoned that this one rode the line.

Rutger and Halliwell led Chloe through the front door of the house to a large and dimly-lit foyer with a marble floor, complete with a circular staircase on the side that led to the second story. From there they went through an equally dimly-lit hallway with beige plaster walls, ornamented by vases that were purchased more for their ability to unify the room they were in than their own merits.

The final stop was an office with white walls and white carpet, the only splashes of color being a black desk with two black chairs on opposite sides, and a red door to the right.

There was the sound of a woman grunting, and aggressive bodily contact coming through the red door.

"Have a seat," Rutger said as Halliwell left. "She'll be with you in just a minute."

Chloe took the seat and waited as the sound of the thudding and female grunting from beyond the red door got louder. It culminated with the woman screaming; not in pain or terror, but as though she were leading the Scottish army against King Edward's British. This was followed by a loud thump and the sound of a body hitting the floor

"Is everything okay in there?" Chloe asked.

"Everything is just fine," Rutger said, and flashed the serene smile of a man too well-paid to give a shit about propriety.

The red door opened and a tan man with blonde hair and cold eyes walked out, the material of his track pants making noise as he did. He walked through the door next to Rutger without making eye contact with, or saying a word to, anyone.

Then, through the red door, walked a beautiful woman in her early thirties with a dark red ponytail and dark brown eyes. She was wearing a clingy black sports bra and even clingier black yoga pants. Her sneakers were so white that they were either new or had never been worn outdoors. She was using a small white towel to mop some of the sweat from around her face and neck, but Chloe saw that she'd missed a spot: a bead of perspiration was slowly traveling down a rather impressive set of six-pack abs.

Chloe lost her train of thought.

"Miss Price?"

Chloe snapped out of it, and this beautiful woman seemed to _notice_ her snapping out of it.

"Forgive my tardiness, Miss Price.  It truly is difficult to find a Krav Maga instructor on a Sunday night. Also, forgive that I don't sit down. I don't want to get sweat on my chair."

"Oh, it's… it's fine," Chloe said, not knowing what to make of the redhead, or the situation she was in. "Who, uh… who _are_ you?"

The redhead smiled in slight embarrassment. "I must also ask you to forgive my lack of manners." She held out a hand. "Denise Leonard."

_"_ _Leonard?"_ Chloe asked after they had broken the handshake. "As in…"

"Leonard International, yes. My father is the CEO, and I myself am the CFO… That's Chief Financial Officer…"

"I know what it means," Chloe said with a friendly smile. She, in fact, did _not_ know what CFO meant, but Chloe felt a strange need to impress this woman.

"So," Denise said. "To business. One of my employees spotted you going into Justin Williams' house today."

"Jesus," Chloe said, letting the politeness drop. "How many people are camped out there?"

"We at Leonard International have a very vested interest in the outcome of that investigation."

"I met a guy today who _also_ had a vested interest. He liked to use a gun to make his point."

"Ah," Denise said. "I see you've made the acquaintance of Michael Dixon. The fellow who calls himself _'The Bull?'"_

"How do you know who The Bull is?"

"Leonard International's business in Arcadia Bay is shipping. An unfortunate fact of life is the shipping business is that trains and trucks are often used to mule drugs, often by third parties without the knowledge of our employees. Which means our shipments are being hijacked. If The Bull is dealing the drugs that come on our shipments, then that means he is _very_ bad for business, and we'd like to see him dealt with to the fullest extent of the law."

Chloe's head started spinning.

"Look," she said. "The last two days have involved two separate people getting shot in the head, one of which right in front of me. Oh, and the kicker? My ex-girlfriend is in town, and she's not very happy with me right now. I don't want you making my week worse. If you want me off the case, just say so. The Bull is one thing, but you? You're, like, _hella_ rich. Richer than God. That means you know where all the places worse than Hell are."

Denise tilted her head and looked down her nose in curiosity at Chloe. _"Hella?"_

That one surprised Chloe, too. She hadn't dropped the H-Bomb in _years._

"On the contrary, Miss Price" Denise said. "We would like you to continue your investigation."

Chloe's left eyebrow headed north on her forehead in surprise. "Say- _what_ -now?"

Denise nodded toward Rutger, and he stepped forward, producing a slip of paper from his jacket pocket, before handing it to Chloe.

It was a check. The first thing Chloe noticed was that it was signed by Denise Leonard, from her personal account. The second thing she noticed was that it was made out to Chloe Price. The third thing she noticed was a number of zeroes bordering on the obscene.

"Wow. That's… a _lot._ But if you're looking for the person who did this, a guy named Arnold Trainor was apparently the shooter. They found him this morning."

"We know this," Denise said. "We also believe that someone hired Trainor to kill Mister Williams, and we would like to know who that is. That's where you come in. You _are_ the detective, after all."

"I'm not a detective," Chloe said.

"Yes, you are. We need someone who is able to go where the dirty cops want no one knowing about, and the clean cops and our own people can't go. That means you."

Chloe looked back down at the check. "And I get this when I figure out who hired Trainor to kill Justin?"

"Oh, no," Denise said, grinning. "You get that _now._ You get another for twice that amount when you find out who hired Trainor to kill Justin."

Had Chloe drunk anything in the last few hours, she might have peed a little.

"We think it leads to The Bull," Denise said. "And that man in prison is the best for Leonard International, and best for Arcadia Bay. Leonard International is willing to be a good friend to you, Chloe."

Denise leaned on the desk, either to relax, or to show off for Chloe, Chloe couldn't tell which.

Chloe looked from Denise, to the check, to Rutger behind her by the door (who had his head cocked to the side, curious as to how all this was going to play out), back to Denise.

"Is solving a murder _all_ I gotta do to get this shitload of money?"

Denise smiled the kind of smile that would have lured a sailor to his doom in a Greek myth. "Well, if you feel that guilty about it, I'm sure we'll think of _some-"_

There was a knock on the door.

_"_ _Yes?"_ Denise asked, and Chloe could sense an edge coming into the smoothness of her voice.

The door to the office opened, and Halliwell peeked in.

"It's here," he said.

Denise's smile brightened her whole face. "Well, bring it in!"

Halliwell walked past Rutger with a package under his arm about the size of the laptop Chloe had at home. He placed it on the desk, and Denise used a nearby gold letter opener to undo the tape holding the package closed. She looked inside, ruffled through the packing peanuts before she found her purchase, sighed, and smiled.

_"_ _Wonderful…"_

Denise took an object out of the box and showed it to Chloe. "Have you ever seen this before?"

The object was a photograph in a gold-plated frame (although given how rich Denise Leonard was, it could have been _actual_ gold). It was of a lighthouse, _the_ lighthouse, the Arcadia Bay lighthouse up on the cliff at Koch's Folly. It had been taken with a Polaroid instant camera. Not only had Chloe seen this picture before, not only was she actually _there_ when the photograph was taken, but she had been dating the photographer at the time.

"Yes," Chloe said, feeling her forehead threatening to flop-sweat. "Yes, I have."

"It's a Max Caulfield original," Denise said. "I'm a great admirer of her work. She's a native of Arcadia Bay, as I understand it. Have you met her?"

"Yes," Chloe said, and Denise noticed her trying to be tight-lipped.

"Is there a story there, Chloe?" Denise asked.

Denise had given Chloe more money than she would see in a year. Honesty was the best policy.

"Um… You know that ex-girlfriend I mentioned a few minutes ago?"

Denise smirked. Chloe detected surprise, delight, two forms of greed that she could recognize, and another four she couldn't.

"Well," Denise said. "Aren't I grateful the world is _so_ small?"

Denise looked at Rutger. "Do be so kind as to escort Miss Price home. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to admire my art, and… think about the future."

Rutger walked Chloe out of the office and closed the door behind them. Apparently Halliwell was taking the rest of the night off.

"Is she always that _… friendly?"_ Chloe asked as they walked to the other end of the hall.

"Only to the people she likes," Rutger said.

"Oh… Does she like _you_ that much?"

"No comment."

The door behind them opened. "Chloe?"

Chloe and Rutger turned around to see Denise coming toward them from the office.

"My card," Denise said, handing it to Chloe. It had no name, and just one number.

"Thanks," Chloe said. "This your work number?"

"No," Denise said. "It isn't." And she walked back into the office.

Chloe looked at Rutger.

"Still don't wanna comment?"

* * *

Rutger drove Chloe home beneath the light of the moon over Oregon. Chloe entered her apartment without turning the lights on, threw her jacket on the recliner, lay down on the sofa, and crashed.

She didn't even take her boots off.

* * *

_Darkness and a chill._

_Sorrow and anger._

_Dirt and a foul stench._

_A cry of surprise._

_She stood up._

"What the f—"

_Blinding light._

* * *

Chloe woke up, and she could still feel the tension from her nightmare in her body. She stood up and rubbed her face trying to release it. It didn't work.

She showered, put on a clean set of clothes, had herself a wake-and-bake session, then put on her jacket and beanie.

Her first stop was the bank, where she deposited Denise Leonard's Fat-as-Fuck check. Chloe imagined all the expensive and fancy places at which she could eat breakfast with her newfound windfall… before realizing there were no such places in Arcadia Bay, and settled on going to the Two Whales, where she ate for free anyway.

As she made her way up the two steps to the diner's door, she found she was remembering more and more of the nightmare that had woken her up that morning… which was odd. Her nightmares usually went away the more she thought of them.

She entered the diner and turned right, trying to spy her favorite booth, but two people were already sitting there.

Her mother Joyce…

...and Max.

Chloe heard someone near her groan the words _"Ohhhh, shit,"_ before she realized she was the one doing it.


	8. Chloe the Oneironaut

**Chapter 8: Chloe the Oneironaut**

_November 5, 2018_

Five years ago, any fears Chloe had about her mother Joyce's reaction to her daughter dating another woman were instantly assuaged by the broad smile that greeted the news of Chloe's relationship with Max Caulfield.

_"_ _I expected you to get knocked-up by some meth-head biker named Travis,"_ Joyce had said to Chloe. _"And you come home with little Max_ Caulfield? _I'm supposed to say_ no _to that?"_

No, the anger that Chloe had feared from her mother was reserved for the news of Chloe and Max's break-up in the spring of 2015. Mother and daughter did not speak to each other for two weeks.

Now, in the fall of 2018, seeing her mother and her ex sharing a booth in the Two Whales, Chloe sensed trouble on the wind. Trouble that was coming right for her, as Joyce saw Chloe, waved in an exaggeratedly happy manner that was unlike her, and got up from the booth.

Joyce walked past Max (the back of her head down over what Chloe imagined was a plate of on-the-house food) towards Chloe. She gave her daughter a hug, and whispered in her ear…

_"_ _Don't fuck this up."_

…before making her way out of the diner. Chloe had only ever heard her mother drop the F-Bomb once. Chloe had been five, and it had been an accident.

Chloe walked to the booth and saw that Max was wearing a black skirt and cardigan. She was hunched over a Belgian Waffle, half of which had already been eaten.

"Look at the brave girl," Chloe said. "Eating something with powdered sugar on it while wearing black."

Max swallowed her mouthful of food. "I couldn't help myself. This is the only place I can find a good Belgian Waffle."

Chloe sat down across from Max.

"Joyce owns this place now?"

"Yeah," Chloe said. "The guy who ran this place, named Bud? He died, and left it to her in his will. She runs this place well, and with all the new people coming into town, she makes bank doing it. She finally got to take that trip to Paris."

"Good for her."

"She certainly thought so."

Max wiped her mouth. "She told me about the divorce, too."

_The Great Joyce/Step-Douche Schism of 2016._ "I'd moved out by the time it happened. People just grow apart, I guess."

"I figured as much," Max said, slapping some weight on the statement. For the sake of diplomacy, Chloe elected to ignore it.

"In hindsight, Step-Douche… well, I guess he's just _regular_ Douche now. He wasn't a bad guy. He just… sucked at being a good one. Not that it made him any better, but…"

Chloe waited to see if Max would use that statement as a weapon. When she saw that she wouldn't, Chloe relaxed a little.

"So what's with the get-up?" Chloe asked.

"Justin's funeral," Max said.

"Right."

"It starts at one, and I just thought I'd stop in and say Hi. Get some food. Are you going?"

"No," Chloe said. "I've kinda been, uh… _informally banned."_

"What did you do?" Max asked, sounding like a parent getting a disciplinary report from a harried teacher about an unruly child.

"I'm looking into Justin's murder, and I found out some things that might make the family uneasy if I ask them about it."

Max smiled. "I _knew_ it!"

"Knew what?"

"I _knew_ your curiosity would get the better of you."

"Took me long enough."

"Yeah," Max said. "Because you have to think it's your idea. That's just how you _are."_

Max put her fork down. "Detective Chloe."

"I'm not a detective."

"Yes, you are. I should buy you a fedora."

"What?" Chloe asked. "No. Douchebags ruined those."

"No, they ruined _trilbies,"_ Max said. "Fedoras have wider brims. Bogart wore fedoras."

"Which is what a douchebag would say, Max."

* * *

Vivian had delivered Chloe's plate of toast, bacon and sunny-side-up eggs while the two were discussing the case.

"So let me get this straight," Max said. "Justin was murdered."

"Right," Chloe said.

"By this guy Arnold Trainor."

"Correct."

"You think someone hired Trainor."

"That's right."

"And so does Denise Leonard."

"Yes," Chloe said. She had omitted some of the other parts of her meeting with Denise. Chiefly that she came on with the force of a speeding truck.

"And there's this other guy who calls himself The Bull, who threatened you because he doesn't want you looking into this at all, for reasons you don't know."

"Yup," Chloe said. She left out the part where The Bull killed someone in front of her, because Max would worry. It was too early in the morning for Max's worry-face.

"And there's Justin's girlfriend, who you don't know, but who might know something about all this."

"Yeah," Chloe said. "I _still_ haven't looked her up."

Max reached into her purse, and came up with her phone.

"What are you doing?" Chloe asked.

"I'm looking up Justin's girlfriend."

"What? No. No, don't."

Max looked confused. "Why not?"

"Please don't help me with the murder investigation," Chloe said, and realizing that it was a sentence that she'd never thought she say after she'd done so.

"Do you know the difference between an olly and a tre flip?" Max asked.

Chloe was confused. "Um… Yeah?"

"So do I. I liked Justin." Max went back to her phone. Chloe sighed.

"Max, I don't need your protection," Chloe said, and instantly regretted it. That hadn't always been the case. If Max had been a coward, Chloe would have died as a teenager, alone and forgotten on a bathroom floor.

Max put her phone down. "This isn't about protecting you," Max said. "Let's just say… Let's just say I have some experience with, y'know… _investigation."_

"Since when?"

"Since for a while now."

Chloe took a bite of bacon and rubbed her eyes. "Okay," she said after she swallowed her food. "Two heads are better than one, maybe. And I guess I'll have to… like… defer to your experience or whatever."

"Good," Max said with a grin, and the table went quiet for a while… until Chloe saw that Max's grin had metamorphosed into a smile.

"What's that for?" Chloe asked.

"I know I'm supposed to be going to a funeral today. I know I'm supposed to be sad, but… It's just really nice to be doing something like this with you again."

Chloe furrowed her brow. "Max… we never did anything like this _before."_

Max looked confused for a second, and then her face changed. Chloe didn't think she caught Max in a lie… but she _did_ think she caught Max giving away a secret without meaning to.

"Oh, yeah," Max said, trying to cover for herself. "I meant doing _some_ thing with you again… N-Not like I'm trying to _start_ anything, or _force…"_

"Right," Chloe said. "Right. Completely on the level. We're just doing this as, uh…"

Max smiled. "Gal-Pals?"

_"_ _Never_ say that again."

* * *

Vivian had taken Max and Chloe's plates away, and had brought post-meal coffee, giving them both the stink-eye the entire time. Max had taken to quizzing Chloe about what had happened to the Blackwell irregulars from five years past.

"Daniel DeCosta?" Max asked.

"Moved with his family to Argentina."

"Alyssa Anderson?"

"Manages at the Wal-Mart outside town."

"Hayden Jones?"

"Full athletic scholarship to the University of Nebraska. Broke his ankle at training camp and came back here. I think he works at his dad's dealership."

"Logan Robertson?"

"Works at a car wash."

"Taylor Christensen?"

"Moved out of town when her mom died. Don't know where."

"Juliet Watson?"

"Staff reporter for the _Arcadia Bay Beacon_."

"Good for her. Courtney Wagner?"

"Runs a fashion blog when she's not substitute teaching.

Max looked comically aghast. "They let _Courtney_ near _children?"_

They both laughed. But Chloe's laughter was stifled by a sudden flash in her brain of the nightmare that woke her up that morning. It must have showed on her face.

"Chloe, what is it?" Max asked, recovering from her laughter.

"Nothing."

"So… _something,_ then?"

Chloe looked at Max. She had weapons-grade doe-eyes.

"I had a nightmare last night. It's kinda bothering me."

"What about?" Max asked.

"It's not even that. It's just… Have you ever remembered _more_ of a nightmare as the day went on, and not _less?"_

"No."

"Guess I must be special then."

Max smiled. "Chloe the Oneironaut."

"What's an...?"

_"Oh-Ny-Roh-Nott,"_ Max said, enunciating every syllable.  "Like an astronaut, but with dreams instead of space."

"Oh."

"So," Max said. "Spill."

Chloe breathed and looked down at her coffee.

"You were with me," Chloe said. "And not like _that,_ I mean… we were kids. Teenagers. It was dark. We were in that junkyard that isn't there anymore, the one Nathan Prescott buried Rachel in. I remember being really _angry_. Really _sad._ We got to where Rachel was buried, and I bent down to see. I heard you calling from behind me. I turned around, and you were falling and holding your neck. And next to you was that Mark Jefferson guy. He had a syringe in one hand and a gun in the other. I remember I had a gun, too. I went for mine, he fired his, and… that's when I woke up."

Chloe looked from her coffee back to Max.

Max Caulfield, who was a pale woman to begin with, had gone a shade paler. Her mouth was open in horror, and her eyes were glassy, as though they were getting ready to tear.

"Max...? Max, what's wrong?"


	9. Five Days in October

**Chapter 9: Five Days in October**

"You're going to miss the funeral."

"I know," Max said.

Chloe and Max had ridden in The Beast back to Chloe's apartment because Max (enigmatic to the point of frustration) told Chloe that she didn't want to say what she had to say in public.

She sat across from Chloe at the far right side of the green sofa in the living room. Chloe took the recliner.

"Can I have something to drink?" Max asked.

"Okay. I have water, uh…"

"Anything stronger?"

"Like… _Pepsi?"_

"Like booze," Max said.

Chloe stared at her.

"It's noon," Chloe said. "And you don't drink."

"I've heard alcohol loosens your tongue," Max said. "And I want my tongue loose. And we're not in a relationship anymore, so you don't get to make a joke about how funny that sounded."

Making a joke about _anything_ was the furthest thing from Chloe's mind. Ex or no, Chloe had ensconced herself in such a dead-zone of human contact over the past three years that Max was still the closest person in her life by default, three years without seeing each other or no. Even Chloe knew when to keep her mouth shut.

"Alright," Chloe said. "Rum and Pepsi it is."

Chloe mixed the drink in the kitchen: a splash of rum and a surplus of soda. She brought it into the living room and handed it to Max, who immediately took a sip and made a face.

"Okay," Chloe said as she sat back down. "My dream seems to have upset you."

Max laughed, and it was not a happy one. It was ragged on the edges, and too high to be anything but pained.

Max took another sip and made another face.

"Five years ago, I fell asleep in my photography class."

"The one Mark Jefferson taught."

"Yeah. I had a very strange dream. I was up on Koch's Folly near the lighthouse. I walked up the hill, looked out over the cliff to the ocean below, and saw a massive tornado coming toward Arcadia Bay. And that's when I woke up. I finished class, went to the bathroom to splash some water on my face, and saw a blue butterfly go into the corner and land on a bucket. I took out my camera and took a picture. A moment later, Nathan Prescott came in… followed by you."

Chloe shifted in her seat.

"You tried to blackmail him. You had an argument. He pulled out a gun, and he killed you right in front of me."

Max stared at her lap, and her last statement held such a finality that Chloe fought the urge to look down and see if she was still there.

"Max… that didn't happen," Chloe said, trying not to sound like an asshole. "I'm alive. I hope that's obvious."

Max smiled, and seemed to reproach herself at the same time for doing so.

"This is where the story gets weird."

"Weirder than me dying and not noticing it?" Chloe asked, _failing_ not to sound like an asshole.

"When the gun went off," Max said, ignoring her, "I reached out for you, and when I did, I felt something… bend. _Swirl_ in the world around me. I felt like my brain was trying to burrow its way out through the back of my skull. And I found myself back in Jefferson's class. At the exact moment that I woke up from that dream about the tornado."

Max went back to staring at her lap again.

"Are… you saying that you went back in _time?"_

"Yes," Max said. "I'm trying not to look at the look on your face. I know it's not a good one."

Chloe would have given anything for a mirror. A great worry gripped her. This girl was _clearly_ suffering from some kind of delusion, and Chloe wondered whether asking about it constituted enabling. And yet…

"What happened next?" Chloe asked.

"I finished the class again. Went to the bathroom again. Took the photo again. You and Nathan came in again and had the argument again, and I pulled the fire alarm before he had a chance to shoot you."

"Max… that didn't happen, either."

"I told you it got weirder. Chloe, I didn't just go back in time. I could _control_ it for a few seconds at a stretch. Always back though, never forward. I used it to… to do stupid shit. Snoop through people's things, get through locked doors. Get paint on Victoria Chase."

"Like a little rewind?" Chloe asked.

"Yeah," Max said. "That's what we called it."

"What _'we'_ called it? I knew about this too?"

Max nodded.

"Okay," Chloe said. "So what did _we_ do with your rewind power?"

Max lost herself in memory for a moment and smiled. "I took the heat with David for you having pot in your room. I guessed how much change you had in your pockets. We used a gun you stole from David to shoot beer bottles at the junkyard."

Chloe felt an iciness deep within her, as her own memories unearthed themselves from a forgotten corner and urgently stumbled to the front of her mind. Not only had she stolen a gun from David a few days before that October morning in the bathroom five years ago, she still had it. It was in her bedroom closet a few feet away… and to her recollection, she had never told Max about it.

"I almost shot Frank Bowers with it," Max said, continuing. "We broke into Principal Wells' office at Blackwell using a pipe-bomb on the door."

"Where the hell did we get a pipe-bomb?"

"I made it," Max said, trying to suppress a grin.

"You know how to make a _pipe-bomb?"_

Max laughed, with real joy this time, before the smile on her lips faded and the memories came back. Her eyes were dreamy and lost, like remembering a warm blanket from a childhood she never had.

"We swam in the Blackwell pool late one night. And…"

Chloe could see Max's face break but for an instant, before recomposing itself. Max sniffled and blinked. Her face looked at Chloe but her eyes looked down.

"And I fell in love with you, Chloe."

Max's eyes finally made contact with hers. Chloe could see tears welling up, and she was struck dumb.

"But… but rewinding time wasn't all I could do," Max said after she took another sip of her drink. "I found out I could… jump through photographs."

"What do you mean?" Chloe asked. "Like, _physically?"_

"No," Max said. "It's kinda hard to explain. Like… Like a transfer of consciousness. I go into a photo, change something, then come back and the world's different because of what I did."

"Give me an example."

Max looked at Chloe with a mixture of pity and trepidation. "God, it was hard the first time I told you about this, too."

"You mean when you told nineteen-year-old Other Me?" Chloe asked. There was no sarcasm in her voice.

"I got it into my head that I could jump into a photograph of us when we were kids, so… I could save your father."

Chloe let her breath out. She had buried her father in more ways than one. She thought she had dealt with William Price's passing, though no doubt she could find any number of therapists that would strongly disagree with her. But seeing his memory dredged up like this, in the ranting of a potential crazy woman, brought her to the brink of fury.

"I take it that didn't go well," Chloe said, slapping a placid face on her anger.

Max took another drink, and had gotten so used to the taste that she didn't bother making a face. "Time is fragile. I know this because William living meant that he bought you a car for your sixteenth birthday. A car that you had an accident in. You were paralyzed from the neck down, you had a tube in your throat. Chloe, your body was failing, and you asked me to… to…"

Max seemed to shut down. Her cheeks reddened, and she slouched even worse than she usually did.  The anger Chloe had been feeling at the mention of her father eroded. She didn't know whether or not to believe this strange story, but now there was no doubt in her mind that _Max_ believed it.

"It's okay," Chloe said, and she was surprised that she wanted to spare Max the agony of telling it more than she wanted to spare herself the agony of hearing it. "You don't have to say anymore about that."

Max straightened up, but continued talking to her lap. "I went back through the photo, undid what I changed, and we were back at square one."

Max finished her drink and put the empty glass on the table next to the sofa. "We were the ones who discovered The Dark Room. We were the ones who found Rachel's body. We went to that junkyard to find Nathan, but Jefferson was there instead. He drugged me with something, and… killed you."

The hairs on the back of Chloe's neck stood on end. "So the dream I had this morning was a memory I had from a timeline that never happened?"

Max nodded.

"So… I got shot twice in one week."

"Well," Max said, "technically _three_ times."

" _Tech—_ Actually, never mind. Jefferson kills me. What happened next?"

"He took me to The Dark Room. David found me and rescued me. I found a photo that Warren Graham had taken of me the night before. I saved you. That damage was undone."

Max rubbed her face. "But all that rewinding I did… _broke_ something in the world. That storm I dreamed about? It came. And every time I had used my rewind power, it just made the storm bigger. And… and we were standing by the lighthouse on Koch's Folly, and you told me that the only way to stop the storm and save Arcadia Bay was for me to go back through the photo of the butterfly I took in the bathroom that Monday, and… let you die."

The words filled the air of the apartment like a gust of wind from a cold snap.

"You seemed so _sure,"_ Max said. "You kissed me. You told me you loved me. And… I let you go. I went through the photo… It's the worst thing I've ever done in my life."

Now, after spending the entire conversation trying to fight it, Max Caulfield began to cry in earnest. Even now, three years after she had walked out on her, Chloe couldn't bear to watch it. It made her a strange kind of sad, like watching a porcelain doll break.

"Do you need to…"

"No," Max said, wiping her eyes. "No, I'm fine."

This was quite obviously not the case.

"Okay," Chloe said. "I'm getting the sense that this is where I come in. How did you go from letting Nathan kill me to stepping in front of the bullet yourself?"

"I got there a moment before you and Nathan came in. I had a little time to think, and… Chloe, it didn't make any fucking _sense!_ I went there thinking you needed to die to stop the storm, but Jefferson killed you. You were dead for the better part of a day and the storm came anyway. It was _all_ my fault, and the only way I could fix everything was if I died in that bathroom instead of you. You live, Nathan and Jefferson pay for what they did, Kate Marsh never tries to commit suicide, the storm never comes. Everyone wins except me. I had to die for it. But that was okay, because…"

For the first time in a while, Max looked Chloe dead in the eye.

"Because I loved you more than I cared about myself."

A silence. Max wiped her eyes as Chloe cycled through possible responses to what she had just heard. All of them were lacking.

"So… what now?" Max asked.

"I… Jesus, Max, I don't know. I mean, there are things you know that I didn't tell you. And I just told you about my dream an hour ago, so you couldn't have made all this up on the spot, but… Why did you tell Other Me about your power, but not, y'know, _Me_ Me."

"Don't talk like that," Max said. "They're _all_ you. But I could prove it back then. When I went through the butterfly photo, I went to a point before I had my powers. Watching you die triggered it, and that didn't happen, so… I don't have the power. Technically, I never did."

"So you say you never rewound, and the storm never came. But didn't going through the photo count as a rewind in and of itself?"

"Apparently not," Max said. "Or at the very least it set the rewind number back to one, and the effects weren't nearly as bad. Like a drop of rain instead of a storm."

Chloe's eyes widened. "The day of Rachel's funeral, one drop of rain landed on my boot, even though there were no clouds in the sky. Are you saying that was _you?"_

Max shrugged her shoulders. "I dunno. _Maybe?"_

Chloe opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again. Her head was filled with so many conflicting thoughts that it was like a war between two sets of equally angry bees.

"So… So I had a dream about my death in another… what, _timeline? Dimension?_ Why do you think that's happening?"

"I don't know," Max said. "But there's someone I can call who might shed some light on it. And I know this is gonna sound weird…"

Chloe looked at Max, and given the way Max looked back, Chloe could guess what kind of look it was."

"I know this is gonna sound weird," Max said again, "but I think this dream has something to do with Justin's murder."

Chloe had heard too much over the last few minutes to be even remotely surprised. "How do you figure?"

"Chloe," Max said. "This is _Arcadia_ _Bay._ When was the last time something happened here that wasn't connected to, like, _fifty_ other things?"

Well… she had a point.


	10. The Prime of Mrs. Victoria Chase

**Chapter 10: The Prime of Mrs. Victoria Chase**

"The person I need to call is probably going to Justin's funeral right now," Max said. "And to be honest, I'm kinda exhausted after… all that."

Chloe nodded. "Did you need me to drive you back to the diner?"

"It wouldn't make sense for me to go back to my car and go back to the hotel only to come back in a couple of hours. Is, um… is it alright if I crash on the couch?"

Chloe squinted. "Max, every inch of me has been on every inch of you. You can sleep on my bed. It's not like I'm gonna be in it."

"I know," Max said. "I just don't want things to get weird… er."

"Then don't make things weirder," Chloe said. "Go to bed."

Max nodded. "Thank you."

"Goodnight," Chloe said as Max disappeared into the bedroom. She sank deeper into the recliner and tried to process the last half hour of revelation and tears in silence. Max had, at one point and if she was to be believed, the ability to rewind time. Furthermore, that ability had now bled into the present day, and into her dreams.

The ramifications were so astounding to Chloe, so far-reaching and complex, that she had to shake her head at times to reassemble them in her line of thought. But the one notion that throbbed beneath the cerebral considerations, the one thing that wounded her pride and broke her heart was this:

_Max and I had a first kiss and I wasn't even there for it._

Chloe was surprised how much this hurt her. Chloe was no stranger to missed opportunities, but this was an opportunity she didn't know she had lost. Taken by an elsewhere version of herself, robbing her of the catharsis of having it taken by someone else.

An urge, as monstrous and irrational as it was needy and pure, arose within Chloe, elbowing aside all coherent thought in her mind like an eager hockey player that took no prisoners on the way to the opposing goalie. The urge to go into the bedroom and crawl into bed next to Max. To wrap her arm around her as she slept on her side. To breathe in the scent of the cheap conditioner in her hair. To kiss the back of her neck and feel her tense in Chloe's embrace. To once again take up the mantle of girlfriend and Big Spoon after three years of dishonorable dereliction. To nestle herself one last time in the warm and passionate gulf between The Then of anger and sadness and The Now of rootlessness and cynicism.

_No._

Chloe got out her phone to banish the urge from within her. She (finally, at long last) looked up Justin Williams' social media accounts. Her first pass at Facebook hit paydirt, as she found a picture of Justin and the Mystery Brunette, complete with a helpful tag.

_Margarita Newman._

She plastered that name on the inside of her memory as she clicked on that tag… and found that Margarita Newman's account was set to private. Chloe would call Dalton to see if he knew her and maybe get an address, if she was lucky.

As she shut her phone off, Chloe saw Max come out of the bedroom fully clothed save for her dress shoes, which she had in her hands.

"Sleep well, alkie?" Chloe asked.

Max nodded. "Your bedroom smells like weed."

"Yup.  The sky's blue, too."

Max smiled.

"So," Chloe said. "Who are we calling?"

* * *

There exist, deep in the woods in and around Arcadia Bay, large houses that were erected especially for the influx of wealthy elites moving into town after Leonard International set up shop. They weren't assembled in neighborhoods, but were rather dispersed one at a time in the wilderness, like breadcrumbs dropped on the forest floor. They were prized for both their opulence and their seclusion, as the only thing that connected them to the outside world were gravel roads leading to the highway.

Denise Leonard owned one of these houses.

So did Victoria Chase.

Only daughter of the Seattle Chases, and literary agent of Kate Bradford (or Kate Marsh, as she had been known until she had married a young copy editor at her publishing house named Josh Bradford), Victoria shunned both the pleas of her parents to move back to Seattle and her client's pleas to move to New York, opting instead to live in Arcadia Bay, where she had graduated from Blackwell Academy, and where her husband worked. When asked why she elected to live in the wilds of Oregon instead of in a city suited to her line of work, her refrain was simple:

_"_ _I love my husband."_

Given the hell she had put him through during their courtship, she figured it was the least she could do for him. Plus, she liked this house, surrounded on all sides by primal green. When the fancy took her, she set out in a t-shirt and jeans for the outer reaches of her property, camera in hand, taking pictures and nursing a dream that still burned within her.

Much like Max Caulfield, Victoria saw no need for higher education after Blackwell, having dropped out of Brown when the connections she had in the art world (namely the ones that introduced aspiring artists to publishing houses as potential writers and illustrators of children's literature) had paid off for her client Kate Marsh in clover undreamed of.

Victoria did a terrible thing to Kate in their year together at Blackwell, for which she had sought repentance. The least she could do in pursuit of penitence was make Katie a millionaire… which she had, a ridiculous number of times over.

On this cool late afternoon in November of 2018, Victoria found herself on the sofa, having just come back from the funeral of Justin Williams, after her old friend Courtney Wagner insisted she go. The faces ranged from the familiar to the half-remembered to the completely foreign. She did not attend the wake.

Having changed into matching crème-colored slacks and a blouse, Victoria was swiping through old Fashion Week photos on her iPad when her phone rang. She answered.

"Hello?"

"Hi," said the person on the other end. "It's Max. Uh, Max _Caulfield?"_

A burn, small and slow, started building in Victoria's stomach. Max Caulfield had sent a man she had admired and respected to prison, and someone she had considered a brother to a mental health facility downstate. And while she could intellectually reconcile the fact that Mark and Nathan were horrible people who had done horrible things and that the world was better off with them in confinement, _emotionally_ she couldn't square away the fact that Max Caulfield had taken things that belonged to her. Before that Monday in October, Victoria held an attitude of dismissiveness towards Max, well-marbled with a low-key envy due to the fact that she didn't have to play by the same set of rules that the painfully beautiful daughter of a fabulously wealthy family was obligated to.  After that Monday?  Victoria didn't like Max.  And she never would.

"Max," Victoria said. "Here to ask more inappropriate favors of my client, or is this a social call?"

"Actually," Max said, "we wanted to ask a favor of you."

_"'_ _We?'"_

"Hi, Victoria," said a female voice on the other end.

"Chloe Price," Victoria said. "Which of the three words that make up _'call me never'_ gave you trouble?"

"Victoria?" Max asked.

"Right. What is this favor, for which you decided to intrude upon my day?"

"Well," Max said as Victoria could almost hear her blushing over the phone. "We'd like to talk to your husband."

Victoria paused as the burn in her stomach got higher. Her husband was yet another sore spot between herself and Max.

"Why?" Victoria asked, importing every molecule of disapproval in her body directly to her voice.

"He's, uh… he's an authority on a subject that we're very interested in."

Victoria swallowed. "Very well."

She took the phone up the broad staircase to the second floor where her husband's study was located. He had taken a break from grading papers to retire to the futon, where his face was hidden behind a book ( _The Last Illusion_ by Porochista Khakpour). She spared a glance at the desk which featured the next two books he planned on reading (Thomas Pynchon's _Inherent Vice_ and Jonathan Lethem's _Gun, With Occasional Music)_ before looking back at her husband.

"Phone for you," Victoria said.

Warren Graham looked up from his book. "Who is it, hon?"

* * *

A year after they had started dating, Warren Graham asked Victoria Chase when she knew deep down that she loved him.

_"_ _After the third date,"_ she had said.

_"_ _That soon?"_

_"_ _Yes. That was the night I got drunk and yelled at Max Caulfield in the Blackwell dorm."_

The first date had been the by-product of a dare from Kate Marsh, who, she had later said, had just wanted to see what would happen when two such dissimilar people went out. The second date was, on her part, the result of intrigue about this strange boy Warren, who, unlike most of the horn-dogs who had been trying to get in her pants since her early teens, seemed more curious and bemused by Victoria than enamored or bewitched. Then came the third date, when they felt comfortable enough and inquisitive enough to be _real._ Warren revealed that though dating Victoria was (in his words) a hoot, there were still residual wounds from his feelings for Max Caulfield (who had gone off into the sunset with that punk chick with the blue hair) that needed to be dealt with.

_"_ _I don't mean, like, I'm still pining over her, or anything. I thought I could make her happy. If someone else can make her happier, then the job I wanted to do is done. It's just… I wasn't good enough. Having that in your head, it'd make anyone sad."_

When she had gotten back to her dorm after the date, she had found that Courtney had smuggled a variety of alcohol and mixers into her room. It took an hour for Victoria to get her drunk on, and she thought of Max all the while.

_Max. Max with the stupid fucking freckles. Max with the never-ending collection of ratty gray hoodies. Fucking Max with her fucking camera, taking stupid fucking selfies and ruining fucking everything. It's not bad enough that she sends my friends away, now she has to leave boot-prints in the guy I'm going on dates with. I don't care if her reasons were good. I don't care if she didn't mean to. She has finally gone way the fuck too far._

Victoria, under the influence of mojitos, rage, and righteousness, stood up. She left Courtney's room and walked down the hall to where Max slept. She knocked on the door. And when Max answered, Victoria did willingly and with malicious aforethought proceed to yell at, bawl out, dress down, and upbraid Max Caulfield in full view and earshot of everyone who lived on that floor. Drill Sergeants equipped with thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries could not have matched, let alone surpassed, the litany of profanity that Victoria heaped upon the clearly confused Max. The highlight of the tirade, and the one most quoted by the rest of the dorm in the coming days and weeks, was:

_"_ _I know you were too busy eating bullets and blue-dyed pussy to give Warren the time of day, and you know what? That's great. That's fine. That works well for me. But you broke the little gomer's heart, and I'm the one stuck picking up after you. I don't pick up after_ anyone. IT'S NOT MY FUCKING JOB!"

It was immediately after she had said this that a realization, as liberating as it was horrifying, hit her with the force and temperature of a bucket of ice water.

_I'm not_ really _all that mad at Max._ _I'm defending my boyfriend's honor. That's what I'm doing right now. The thing… that I am doing… is that…_

This was an entirely new prospect for her. She'd viewed people in general (and men in particular) as things she would have to react to, dominate, finesse, because the one major pitfall of being rich and pretty was that rich and pretty were all people saw. In every relationship she'd had with any other human being, she was seen as either a commodity to be acquired for her wealth and beauty, or an object of fear and terror because of her considerable ire. 

But _Warren?_ Warren was different.  He observed her, wanted to know what made her tick.  And she didn't get the sense that he did it in pursuit of any endgame that would benefit himself, but because he'd never had the opportunity to talk to someone like her.  He didn't lacquer on charm or go out of his way to impress her.  He didn't craft an image of himself to plaster over his real face.  And he didn't _push._ They'd been on three dates by now, and no kiss.  It was almost as though that, even while he was dating her, he knew he didn't have a shot, and so he was going to enjoy whatever time he spent with her while it lasted.  But what would happen if she told her he _did_ have a shot?  What would the look on his face be like?  Would he smile?  Would that make her happy?  Did she want to know the answer to that last question?

That she could have actual positive feelings about another human being that had nothing to do with family, convenience, or her own overweening senses of inadequacy and guilt, was beautiful. And terrifying. And confusing.

So confusing, in fact, that she immediately broke off from the stunned Max and left for the stairwell.

_"_ _Yelling at Max made you realize you loved me?"_

_"_ _Yeah."_

_"_ _How so?"_

_"_ _Because picking up after other women_ isn't _my job. It shouldn't be anyone's… But I did it for you. You must have been worth it."_

She leaned in and whispered into Warren's ear.

_"_ _That, and you're the only one I know who hates_ Sword Art Online _as much as I do."_

Three years after her drunken tear, Victoria Chase married Warren Graham. It forever sealed the relationship that had been called _"adorable"_ by Kate Marsh, _"kinda creepy"_ by Juliet Watson, and _"an affront to both God and American Liberty"_ by Brooke Scott.

* * *

"You have a _science_ question?" Warren asked. He looked at the watchful gaze of his wife on the other side of the room.

"Yeah," Chloe said over the phone. "Scientifically speaking, _how the hell did you land Victoria Chase?"_

"You shush," Max said. "What do you know about timelines?"

"Time _lines?"_ Warren asked. _"Plural?"_

"Yes," Max said.

"Umm…" Warren said. "I'm the science teacher at Blackwell. Quantum physics kinda isn't my field. We're dissecting frogs tomorrow."

"I know," Max said. "It's just, um… Back in the day, your wild guesses used to be right."

Victoria rolled her eyes and drew a finger across her throat.

"Okay," Warren said, smiling. "I'll try to help you out however I can."

"Alright," Max said. "So… _hypothetically…"_

"I should certainly hope so."

"What? Oh, right. Let's say a bunch of alternate timelines were opened a few years ago before an event sealed them all off. Would it somehow be possible for those timelines to… like… _bleed through_ into ours now? Like, through dreams or something?"

Victoria mouthed words that Warren found easy to read: _What the fuck is she talking about?_

"Again, I have to say, I'm a science teacher and an amateur sci-fi writer. Anything I say after this point will pretty much be me talking out of my ass."

"You're writing sci-fi?"

"Max," Chloe said. "Focus."

"Oh, right. You were saying?"

Warren rubbed his forehead. "Do you know what alveoli are?"

"Those little pasta things they serve at the Olive Garden?"

"Jesus," Chloe said. _"I_ know what alveoli are."

"You shush," Max said again. "What are they?"

"They're in your lungs," Warren said. "See, lungs aren't like balloons, they're made up of a ton of these alveoli, which are little air sacs in your lungs where the gas exchange takes place, turning the oxygen you inhale into the carbon dioxide you exhale."

"So…"

"So, all these alveoli cause the lungs to inflate. They do so simultaneously. Timelines, I would imagine, are like alveoli. If one opens, they all open. If those opened timelines from years ago are bleeding through here, then that means someone is screwing with the timeline _now."_

The pause at the other end of the line was long.

"Did… that answer your question?"

"Yeah," Max said. "Thanks, Warren. You've been a big help."

Max hung up without saying goodbye. Warren looked at Victoria, who was grinning.

"You almost _dated_ that," she said. _"Nerd."_

* * *

Max put the phone down. She looked lost.

"Someone is fucking around with time," Max said. "And for the first time, it's not me."

"If Warren's to be believed," Chloe said. "Seriously, how could he know all this?"

"He knew what was going on five years ago in another timeline," Max said. "That makes him the authority."

Chloe gawked at Max. _"Says who and since when?"_

"I dunno," Max said. "Just go with it."

Max rubbed her face. "You up for a road trip tomorrow?"


	11. The Bradford Dormitory

**Chapter 11: The Bradford Dormitory**

_November 6, 2018_

After the phone call, Chloe drove Max back to the diner, so she could pick up her rental car to go back to the hotel. In the parking lot of the Two Whales, they'd agreed to meet each other the following morning at the Embassy Suites at nine sharp.

Chloe went home, blazed, and for the first time in recent memory, set her alarm clock.

It went off at eight the following morning. Chloe's first act of the day, even before getting out of bed, was to text Max to tell her that she was up, and was about to get ready.

She'd forgone her wake-and-bake ritual, brushed her teeth in the shower, and put on her last pair of clean jeans until tomorrow's laundry day. Black t-shirt, green jacket, glasses and beanie: ready to go.

She texted Max again once she got to the hotel parking lot. Max texted back immediately:

**im in the bar in the lobby ;P**

Emoji.

"Christ," Chloe said to no one in particular. "You're _twenty-three years old."_

The moment Chloe walked through the hotel door, she spotted lustrous hair of a familiar red hue before she noticed that her ex-girlfriend was there as well.

Max was talking to Denise Leonard.

Chloe expected mortal terror, and she got a flash of it, but that soon subsided, and Chloe was imbued with a childlike curiosity. Indeed, she found it almost marvelous that Denise (who was as subtle in her attempts to hit on Chloe as a grenade going off in church) and Max (whose baby pictures could be found in the dictionary next to the word _"mousy"_ ) could share the same atmosphere, let alone the same table, without the fabric of reality itself violently rejecting it as though it were a stolen debit card.

Denise saw Chloe coming and waved while Chloe was still out of earshot, so she couldn't hear what the two of them had to say to each other. The two met a few feet away from Max, who was sipping iced tea through a straw. She looked like she wasn't listening, which, Chloe knew from experience, meant that Max was straining to hear every syllable.

"You know," Denise said, "I've never had a girl leave me waiting by the phone for two days. It's a new and altogether unpleasant experience."

"I didn't get a new lead until last night," Chloe said, playing dumb. "I haven't had a chance to follow up on it."

Chloe could see that Denise saw through the attempt at evasion, but decided not to call her on it. The woman's ability to read her was uncanny.

"Don't reduce me to simple innuendo," Denise said. "It cheapens us both. What's the lead?"

"Does the name Margarita Newman ring a bell?"

"Should it?"

"It's Justin's girlfriend. She might know more. I'm gonna call some people, see if they know her number, where she lives, all the goodies."

"Good," Denise said. "I have something for you."

Denise reached into the pocket of her gray designer suit jacket and pulled out a key. She handed it to Chloe. It bore the number 211.

"You… _shouldn't have?"_

"It's a key to a storage shed at Big Bob's Storage," Denise said. "It's out near the highway."

"What's there?"

"All the evidence in the death of Justin's shooter."

"Arnold Trainor?"

"That's right."

"Shouldn't this evidence be at the police station?"

Denise smiled. "How big do you think this town is? Do you think that tiny police station can hold _every_ bit of evidence from _every_ crime? No. The Arcadia Bay Police Department pays Big Bob to use Big Bob's Storage the same as any private citizen would, before the evidence is sent to a compound in Salem to gather dust forever. It's not even guarded. All you need to get in to any of the sheds is a key like that one."

Chloe pocketed the key. "Where did you get it?"

"The Bull isn't the only one who has people inside the ABPD, Chloe. If anyone can donate to the city's police, then anyone will."

"If you have cops in your pocket," Chloe said, "then why do you need me to look through this storage shed? Why do you need me to do anything at all?"

"Because you can throw money at a cop, but you can't make him work. Arnold Trainor is an ex-con, and the only suspect in the shooting of Justin Williams. They won't even entertain the notion of breaking a sweat over who killed him. Not to mention that, for a woman in my position, third parties are sometimes best. More than this, I shall not say."

"Well," Chloe said. "That's, uh…"

"I'm rich," Denise said. "I believe the word you're looking for is _'eccentric.'"_

Denise looked back at Max.

"I have to say, Chloe. I'm not surprised the two of you broke up. Some of us have trouble keeping up with others."

"I don't know," Chloe said. "I thought I could keep up with her pretty well."

Denise put her hand on Chloe's shoulder and turned on the gleam in her dark brown eyes.

"Chloe, sweetie… I wasn't talking about _you."_

And off Denise went. Chloe watched Denise's gray skirt hug her thighs for dear life as she walked away. She couldn't imagine anyone wearing that in a boardroom, but something told Chloe that Denise could bring the world to its knees wearing a parka.

Chloe walked the few feet into the bar and took the chair next to Max.

"Wowser," Max said. "The richest woman in Arcadia Bay just put the mack on on my ex-girlfriend right in front of me."

Chloe looked at Max.

"I mean, we're not together anymore," Max said, "and you can do what you want, but… _Rude."_

Chloe _still_ looked at Max.

"I'm being an adult," Max said. "It's this thing I'm trying."

Chloe looked into the lobby.

"She's a Max Caulfield groupie," Chloe said.

"I know."

"I figure bagging her hero's ex is a bigger prize than any original photos she might buy. There's a difference between wanting to sleep with someone and hunting them for their pelt. I don't know which one Denise wants. Not to mention, being some rich chick's _toy?"_

"I guess it depends on the rich chick," Max said. "You know, I read that when her dad dies, she's not getting anything."

"Really?"

"Yup. I looked her up last night after you brought her up at the diner. It's all going to charity. I hope she likes wearing that suit for the rest of her life… Oh my _God,_ I just imagined Denise and Victoria getting into an argument!"

And now, so did Chloe.

_"_ _Wow,"_ Chloe said. "It'd be like Godzilla versus… other, _hotter_ Godzilla!"

Max looked confused. "Which one's Hotter Godzilla?"

"There's a wrong answer to that question?"

* * *

As Max drove Chloe in her rental to their destination, the two discussed the case, and Chloe was impressed by the fact that Max had found out about Margarita Newman, as well as locating where she lived, through a wild and woolly discipline of Google-Fu that Chloe herself had yet to master.

Max pulled into the parking lot of Blackwell Academy.

"Why are we here?" Chloe asked.

"To talk to someone."

"Who?"

Max paused before she said "Someone who knows more than he lets on."

The first order of business was to go the Principal's Office to get visitors' passes from Principal Grant, who had taken over for Principal Wells five years earlier after the Blackwell Board of Trustees asked for his resignation (This was after some enterprising member of the Blackwell faculty leaked hidden documents to the _Beacon_ pertaining to Nathan Prescott's delinquent proclivities before he had shot Max Caulfield, leading the board to believe that the incident could have been prevented had Wells taken Nathan in hand).

"I just don't see why we need these," Max said as she pinned her little plastic badge to the front of her jacket.

"We're old," Chloe said. "We could be creepy perverts, for all they know."

"I dated you when you were a teenager, Chloe. Trust me. You were a creepy pervert _then."_

Chloe laughed.

The first thing Chloe saw as soon as the stepped out of the main building was a young girl in jeans and a green flannel shirt power-walking with a gym bag under her arm towards the Blackwell pool, obviously late for class.  Chloe's mind _told_ her the girl had to have been eighteen, but what she _saw_ was someone who didn't look a day over twelve.  That's how every high school kid would ever look to Chloe for the rest of her life.  
  
_Jesus,_ she felt _ancient._

The closer Chloe and Max got to the girls' dorm, the slower Max wanted to go. It became less about the case, or Chloe's dream, or time travel, and more about Max's trip down Memory Lane… a trip that held no memories of Chloe, or rather, the Chloe standing next to her. Thinking about _versions_ of herself weirded Chloe out.

"This place changed my life," Max said as she stopped at the Principal's Residence next to the girls' dorm. Max looked at the plaque near the edge of the house, and her hand went to her mouth.

"Max? What's wrong?"

Chloe stood next to Max and looked at the plaque.

**THE BRADFORD DORMITORY**  
**Named so after Kate Bradford.**  
**Arcadia Bay's Greatest Daughter,**  
**Blackwell Alumnus,  
** **And Generous Donor.**

"Yeah," Chloe said. "This used to be the Prescott Dorm, didn't it? I guess they didn't want…"

Chloe trailed off when she saw the tears in Max's eyes.

"This place gave Kate so much shit," Max said. "And they named the dorm she tried to jump off of after her."

"I don't remember Kate trying to jump off of a roof, so… another timeline?"

Max nodded as she wiped her eyes. "This… this actually feels really good. But we're not here for this. Come on."

They walked past the dorm to the small adjacent room in the building's side. Chloe stopped.

_"_ _Samuel?"_

"Yup," Max said.

"Why are we stopping to see _Samuel?"_

"You'll see."

Max opened the door and stepped in. Over her shoulder, Chloe could see Samuel, his graying hair grown out and his goatee from years past now a full beard, on his knees, trying to repair a lawnmower. He looked up, saw Max, and grinned as he rose.

"Young Max," Samuel said. "It is such a pleasure to see you."

"You remember me?" Max asked.

"Samuel could never forget the hero of Arcadia Bay," he said. "Such heroism is a rarity in the world. To see it here at Blackwell warms many a heart."

Max looked at Chloe outside the door before looking back at Samuel.

"I didn't feel like a hero," Max said. "I just… did what needed to be done."

_"_ _Really?"_ Samuel asked. _"Every_ time?"

Max's eyes widened, and it was only now that Chloe dared venture into the small dank space of Samuel's lair. When he saw her, the grin on his face broke into a full beam.

_"_ _Well,"_ Samuel said. "Good morning, Detective."

"I'm not a detective."

"Yes, you are."

"Y'know, a lot of people have been saying that to me lately," Chloe said.

"Because it's the truth," Samuel said. "Too few people occupy themselves with such a thing as the truth. But you're different, Detective."

"Is that so?" Chloe asked.

"It is," Samuel said. "The truth isn't a comfortable thing, and only those who've made a habit of discomfort are fit to seek it out. Samuel needs only to look at you to know that's the case. But take heart. If there is truth to be found, it is all but a certainty that Detective Chloe Price will find it. After all, _'The truth will set you free.'"_

"In my experience," Chloe said, "that's a little on the bullshitty side."

"Well, no one said the truth was in any great hurry to do so. But Samuel assures you… You aren't the only one the truth will liberate."

Chloe tilted her head. "How do you _know_ all this?"

Samuel shrugged. "The same way you do."

And with that, Samuel bent back down to tinker with the lawnmower some more. Chloe and Max looked at each other.

"Okay," Chloe said. "It's been… a thing. You keep being you, Samuel. Looks like a lot of fun. Let's go, Max."

"Detective?"

Chloe and Max halted their retreat to look back at Samuel. He didn't look at them.

"Samuel knows these days have been hard on you, and the days to come shall be harder still. But if there are words to be offered in the name of consolation, let them be these."

Samuel finally looked at them.

"One day," he said, "and it will be a day very soon… You will be _just like me."_

* * *

Chloe and Max walked across the front lawn of Blackwell in a bigger hurry than the first time they did it minutes before.

"That wasn't, like, hella fucking creepy," Chloe said.

"I know," Max said. "And our day isn't over yet. There's someone else we need to talk to."

"Who?"

"I'm not telling you. You're not going to like it."

"Max, there are a lot of things today that I don't…"

Chloe stopped talking when she saw that Max had stopped walking. She turned around and saw Max staring at the bulletin board near the stairs that led into the school. Chloe remembered that board well. She had pasted it with Rachel Amber missing person posters the day Nathan tried to kill her in the bathroom.

And, in a twist of fate that Chloe could only call cruel, there was another missing person's poster for another blonde girl on that very same board.

"What is it with this shithole and missing girls?" Chloe asked.

Max yanked the poster off the board. "Jennifer Healy," she said. "Eighteen years old. Does she look familiar to you?"

Chloe took the poster from Max as Max dug into her jacket for her phone.

"No," Chloe said. "Should she?"

"How far did you get in your internet search on Margarita Newman?"

"Facebook," Chloe said. "Her account's private, but I just needed a name."

"Well," Max said as she furiously swiped the screen on her phone. "Her Instagram account _isn't_ private."

Max held out the phone to Chloe. Margarita Newman, all smiles on a sunny day, her left arm draped over the shoulder of Jennifer Healy, Arcadia Bay's newest missing blonde.

"Ohhhh, _fuck_ me," Chloe said.

Max put her phone back in her jacket. "I _told_ you everything in this town is connected. And if you ask me, and I know this sounds weird… She's the one who's been screwing with time."

Chloe was taken aback. "Have you developed a new ass to yank all this out of, or do you still have just the one?"

"She's the same age as I was, from the same town, going to the same school. I… I _feel it."_

And with that, Chloe Price's last good nerve withered and died.

"Oh, you _feel_ it? You tell me about time travel, another Me you fell in love with, you have me talking to crazy-ass janitors, and now you _feel_ this missing girl having the same powers you say you did? Look, Max, I'm not too proud to say that I kinda, sorta believed you yesterday when you dropped all this shit on me, but I need a fuck-load more to go on than just…"

Chloe never got to finish her sentence.

Whatever Fates or Furies govern the workings of the universe in general, and Arcadia Bay in particular, never let it be said that they don't have a sense of irony that borders on the poetic. For out of a cloudless sky, on this unseasonably warm November morning, one single drop of rain fell. Had it fallen mere feet in any other direction, Chloe Price no doubt would have dissolved her would-be partnership with Max Caulfield, sending them both on their separate ways, most likely for good.

But that drop of rain fell on the missing person's poster in Chloe Price's hand, right on the smiling face of Jennifer Healy, with a loud enough _splat_ to make both of the women jump.

Burning with a memory of a similar drop of rain landing on her boot at Rachel's funeral, Chloe looked up, then at the ground around her for other, similar drops of precipitation. None came.

Chloe looked at Max, who looked as scared as she herself felt… but not too scared to look the tiniest bit smug.

"Okay," Max said. "How about now?"


	12. Through Portals Unseen

**Chapter 12: Through Portals Unseen**

Chloe and Max spent the first half of their trip (whose end point Max still wouldn't divulge) in a silence that was equal parts stunned and stony.

Chloe could at least somewhat imagine that Max made up her time travel story on the spot after she told her about her nightmare. She could at least somewhat imagine that Max had called Samuel ahead of time to set up their little freak-out session in the tiny room off the Blackwell girls' dorm.

But Chloe could not, in any way, imagine that Max had conjured a single drop of rain to fall on the missing person's flyer of Jennifer Healy _exactly_ when it did.

That one raindrop dispelled from Chloe any doubts she'd had about Max's story. Time was not rigid and linear, but malleable and controllable by human hands. The only nits to be picked were the tiny logical inconsistencies that she couldn't wrap her head around.

"I have a question," Chloe said.

"Well," said Max, "let's see if I have an answer."

"I'm having nightmares about my life in another timeline. But… why isn't anyone else?"

Max thought for a moment. "Who's to say they aren't? I mean, you thought you were just having a nightmare. Maybe everyone else is treating it like that. And if they are, it's not like they're gonna put two and two together. They're not gonna say  _'Oh, I had this nightmare, that means there are other timelines.'"_

Chloe nodded. "Are _you_ having nightmares about other timelines?"

Max didn't say anything.

_"_ _Well?"_

"Chloe," Max said. "I was having those nightmares anyway."

Chloe took this as her cue to shut up. A few more moments of silence.

"What's bugging _me,"_ Max finally said, "is that if someone is screwing around with the timeline… why are things in Arcadia Bay relatively normal?"

"Define _'normal.'"_

"I mean, when I rewound, it caused a storm, but a bunch of other weird weather shit happened too."

"What kind of weird weather shit?" Chloe asked.

"Snow falling on eighty degree days, eclipses when there aren't supposed to be any, whales beaching themselves, two moons in the sky…"

_"_ _Fuck,"_ Chloe said. "That must have been terrifying."

"We got through it."

Another lull.

"You don't like that, do you?" Max asked.

"I don't like what?"

"When I bring up how you were in the other timelines."

Chloe scratched her head beneath her beanie. "I'm not gonna say I enjoy it. There's another me somewhere in the past…"

"Chloe…"

"I know, I know, they're all me. But the girl you knew did shit I didn't know about and couldn't… I dunno…"

Chloe took her glasses off and rubbed her nose, thinking of what to say next.

"Back when we first started dating, you had this _look_ sometimes."

"What look?" Max asked.

"That… that _look._ That look you get when you see a movie they made off of a book you read, and you know something the characters don't. That little _smirk._ When you got shot in that bathroom, I hadn't seen you in five years, but you'd met me and fell in love with me for five days somewhere, some _when_ else. You knew me before I _let_ you know me. I mean, if the roles were reversed, could you tell me in all honesty that you wouldn't feel a little taken advantage of?"

"Chloe, I didn't…"

"I know," Chloe said. "I know you didn't mean for any of this to happen. But it did. It happened. And that's how I feel."

Chloe felt her eyes burning. She couldn't deny that it felt cathartic to vent to Max about Max-related problems… even though they weren't the _specific_ Max-related problems that had been hanging over both of them since Max had returned to Arcadia Bay days before.

"But hey," Chloe said. "It's over. It's fine. I'm not your girlfriend anymore. We're The Hardy Girls now. Doing the detective thing. Let's keep it that way."

Silence.

"You still haven't told me why you left me."

Chloe glared at Max. "You can't be serious."

"I _shouldn't_ be?"

Chloe rubbed her face. "You sat on the fact that you could travel through fucking _time_ for _five years!_ And if I hadn't told you about that nightmare… memory, whatever, you'd have sat on it for even _longer!_ And now I'm supposed to just start spilling my secrets because, what, you got backed into a corner where you finally had to be honest?"

"I'm not saying you can't lord it over me," Max said with a tremble in her voice. "I'm just curious about how long you plan to do it."

_"_ _For the rest of my fucking life, Max!_ Who are you to tell me what I would have believed or not? It's like you thought I was too stupid to get it. Or you didn't have the faith in me that _I would have had in you!"_

Chloe put her glasses back on. Max wiped a tear out of her eye, then put that hand back on the steering wheel.

"Alright," Max said. "I won't ask again."

Chloe and Max were silent for the rest of the car ride…

* * *

…until they got to their destination, anyway.

It was a pastoral place in the country: a large, regal, and ancient joint surrounded on three sides by beautiful Oregon woods. The sign near the front gate said **"CYRUS HAVERFORD MEMORIAL MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY."**

"Fuck… No," Chloe said. _"Him?"_

"Yes," Max said. "Him."

"Why do we need to talk to him?"

"There are things five years ago that didn't add up. About Arcadia Bay. About my power… He might shed some light on some specifics."

Chloe leaned back in her seat in a huff.

"I know you don't like it," Max said, "but it needs to be done."

"Max," Chloe said. "He killed Rachel, tried to kill me, and _almost_ killed you. Nothing would make me happier than to kill _him."_

* * *

Chloe had last seen Nathan Prescott in a Portland courtroom in April of 2014, after a protracted series of hearings to determine his mental competency. It was there that Judge David Lin ruled that Nathan Joshua Prescott was unfit to stand trial in the manslaughter of Rachel Dawn Amber, the third degree assault of Maxine Caulfield, the first degree unlawful imprisonment of Kate Beverly Marsh, and the second degree assault of Chloe Elizabeth Price (As, thanks to his cooperation with the investigation and the entreaties of his legal team, the initial charges were pled down to lesser offenses).

The courtroom was showered in gasps and boos, Max hugged Chloe's arm, and Chloe herself felt her vision overcome with the red shimmer of burning eternal hatred. Nathan, however was glassy-eyed, medicated to the gills under doctor's (or lawyer's) orders. But even then, he was eminently youthful. Eminently pretty. Eminently fucking _punchable._

The Nathan Prescott of 2018, however, was a twenty-three year old man who didn't look a day under thirty-five. Confinement had not been kind to him. He had bags under his eyes and crow's feet around them. His high school hairstyle (which had reminded Chloe of the extras in _Grease_ ) had been replaced by a short style that was little more than a buzz. His face had a corona of blonde stubble. His teeth had visibly yellowed. To Chloe, he looked like the _After_ picture on one of those old _Not Even Once_ posters.

The three of them were in a bare room that held only a table and two chairs. Max sat across from Nathan as Chloe stood in the corner. Nathan was flanked on either side by two burly-as-fuck orderlies.

Nathan spoke first.

"This," he said, "is _very_ awkward."

"Well," Max said. "I'd like to thank you for agreeing to talk to us today."

Nathan looked in the corner and seemed, for the first time, to see Chloe.

_"_ _Chloe?"_ he asked. "I didn't recognize you without the blue hair."

Chloe summoned the steeliest gaze she could muster and softly shook her head. _Not today, motherfucker._

"I'm sorry," Nathan said to Max, "but I'd really like to hear what she has to say."

Nathan looked at Chloe again. His face didn't seem to be looking for forgiveness or pity. It held the kind of placidity found on star players in high-stress situations, and Chloe felt a new kind of fury at the man.

"I hurt you," Nathan said to Chloe. "I hurt people close to you. Doctor Partridge may disagree, but I think I need to hear what you have to say to me. I want to get better, and I can't do that if I pretend I didn't do terrible things. As long as you don't come across the room and physically hurt me, I want to hear what you've been dying to say to me for five years."

Now that she'd been given the opportunity, her mind was blank. She looked at Max, who appeared not to know either, before looking at the orderlies. One was checking his phone, and one was looking at… well, nothing, really.

Chloe looked back at Nathan as she cobbled words together in her head.

"You may not think I have any sympathy for you," Chloe said, "but that's not true. I _do_ have sympathy for you, Nathan. It's the same kind I have for rabid dogs. Yeah, your life was terrible, rich or not. Yeah, I should blame your masters like your dad or Jefferson more. But it still doesn't make you any less dangerous. Or any less deserving of being put down. You made a habit of hurting me and the people I love, and one of my goals in life is living long enough to piss on whatever unmarked hole they bury you in."

Chloe let that hang in the air as Nathan waited to see if she was finished.

"Thank you," Nathan said, and the little bastard looked like he meant it.

"I do encores," Chloe said.

"He said _'thank you,'_ Chloe," Max said, and affixed Chloe with her sweetest and brightest shut-your-cakehole smile before turning back to Nathan.

"I have questions about five years ago," Max said. "There are things I'm not clear on."

"Really?" Nathan asked. "I shot you. It seems cut and dry to me."

The air left the room. Nathan grinned and shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I forgot how scary sarcasm from a mental patient can be. What are your questions?"

Max shifted in her seat as she assembled herself. "There were… _notes_ and things. Messages. Passed between your father and Mark Jefferson and you that… didn't make any sense. Things about your destiny. The destiny of Arcadia Bay. I was wondering what they meant."

Nathan's eyes narrowed. "How would you know about these?" he asked. "I'd have thought they'd be in evidence."

"Not all of them," Max said. Chloe had been able to tell from Max's voice whenever she told a little white lie. This was one of those times.

Nathan grinned and shook his head again. "The storm never came," he said to himself.

Chloe got goosebumps.

"What… What's this about a storm?" Max asked. Nathan looked at her.

"Have you ever heard of The Myth of the Traveler?"

Max shook her head.

"I don't suppose you would have," Nathan said. "Dad said it was one of the few secrets in a world that couldn't keep them."

Nathan closed his eyes, as though he was trying to remember something.

_"_ _By the sea,"_ Nathan said, _"a girl will break the world. She will go back when others go forward, and she will pass through portals unseen. She will tear the sky. She will sunder the waves. She will bring the wind to shore beneath a fiery, watchful eye."_

Nathan opened his eyes. Chloe couldn't see Max's face from where she was standing, but she was willing to bet Denise Leonard's check that her eyes were as round as dinner plates.

"Every culture has an end-of-the-world myth, but what they don't tell you is that a lot of mythologies have more than one," Nathan said. "That particular one is found in Inuit oral history… and Hopi. And Slavic. Chinese, Celtic, Maori. Small and obscure enough to only be known by professors and history buffs, and worded differently enough from culture to culture so that it doesn't raise too many red flags. The Myth of the Traveler isn't taught as often as other myths in the same mythologies because it contradicts a whole lot of other things, but… if all those cultures have the same myth, then there has to be something to it, right?"

Nathan crossed his legs under the table. "Every year, the richest families in the Pacific Northwest get together at a resort in Astoria. They drink expensive booze, talk shop, play racquetball, and regale each other with tales of what they would do if they caught The Traveler. They convinced themselves that the part about going back when others go forward meant that The Traveler could control _time._ You control The Traveler, then, well… you'd control _everything,_ wouldn't you?"

Nathan's expression stiffened. "My dad was different. See, he thought that whatever was going to go down regarding The Traveler was going to go down in Arcadia Bay, because he thought the part about the fiery, watchful eye meant the lighthouse up at Koch's Folly. And he didn't want to control The Traveler at all… He wanted to let the storm come. Because buying buildings and businesses in Arcadia Bay was more expensive than buying the flat plot of land where Arcadia Bay _used_ to be."

"So," Max said. "Where does your destiny come in?"

"Well, my family has known about this myth for generations," Nathan said. "My family didn't go from rich to _filthy_ rich until the fifties, when Prescott Development cut a deal with the federal government to build underground bunkers in Arcadia Bay. We built a _ton_ of them, and said they were for when the Russians bombed us. They never did, of course. They were for the storm that The Traveler would bring. In the eighties, my dad formed The Vortex Club at Blackwell. It started out as a kind of haven for misfits and punks, before it became… well, you saw what it was. It was a fixture at that school for almost thirty years until I…"

"Shot me?" Max asked.

Nathan nodded. "Should the storm have ever come during my time at Blackwell, it was my job to lead the rich and the privileged of The Vortex Club into those bunkers to wait out the storm. That was my destiny. Guide the moneyed into the wasteland."

"How did you plan on finding The Traveler?" Max asked. "I mean, what were you supposed to look for?"

"Well, Dad didn't want to find The Traveler, but I think they were looking for teenage girls with incredibly good luck. I mean, who wouldn't abuse that kind of power to turn everything her way?"

Max looked at Chloe, who had shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

"The day before I shot you, my dad came to me and said he was convinced that the storm was coming that week. I didn't want to believe him, but I kinda did. I went to jail, the week passed, and the storm didn't come. I… didn't handle it well."

Max stood up. "Thanks for talking to me today."

Nathan shrugged. "In hindsight, it really is the least I could do."

Max and Chloe made for the door.

"Chloe?"

They turned around.

"I know it doesn't mean much," Nathan said, "nor should it. But… I'm sorry for what I did. To you and yours. I… I'm sorry."

"Nathan, I say this from the bottom of myheart," Chloe said. "Go fuck yourself."


	13. Getting Unlucky

**Chapter 13: Getting Unlucky**

In a small courtyard outside the Cyrus Haverford Memorial Mental Health Facility, Chloe Price smoked a Parliament Light as Max Caulfield watched. They were both silent, and both with very different looks on their faces.

Chloe appeared to be taking no joy in her cigarette. She eyed the cement that made up the courtyard floor like a disapproving hawk. She appeared as though her brain was very quickly scanning the red haze on the surface of an alien planet for signs of life as she absent-mindedly puffed away.

"Murder," Chloe said.  "Drugs.  Time travel.  Kidnapping.  And a doomsday prophecy.  Y'know, I've _heard_ of normal lives.  I wonder what they're like."

Max, for her part, looked like the protagonist of a _Twilight Zone_ episode after the credits had started rolling, trying to make sense of the all-too-cute and curiously writerly moral twist that the universe had thrown at her. She looked at Chloe.

"Was telling the mental patient to go fuck himself really necessary?"

"No," Chloe said. "Felt good, though. He earned it."

More silence before Max looked up again.

"Is destiny really destiny if I keep avoiding it?"

Chloe looked at her. "How do you mean?"

"I mean, five years ago, I came to Arcadia Bay to take a photography class. It turns out, my coming was foretold."

Chloe immediately conjured at least five dirty jokes for Max's last sentence (and that wasn't including _"That's what she said!")_ but the gravity of the situation stayed her tongue.

"But somehow, I even screwed that up," Max said. "I'm destiny-proof."

Chloe's lips parted.

* * *

_The night that Max stopped the long fall. The air as thick with mystery and possibility as it was with humidity and fireflies._

"I'm so glad you're my partner in crime."

"As long as you're my partner in time."

* * *

_"_ _Chloe?"_

Chloe came back to earth. The sense of disorientation was so strong that she used her hand to close her mouth.

"What is it?" Max asked.

Chloe took a second.

"My partner in time," Chloe said. She looked at Max to see if her expression changed. Her eyes fluttered, but nothing more.

"I called you that, didn't I?" Chloe asked. "The night Kate Marsh tried to jump off of the Prescott Dorm."

"Yeah," Max said. "You did."

The deep breath Chloe took in shuddered on its way out. Another person's, another _Chloe's_ memories were finding their way into her mind, and now they didn't even have the courtesy of waiting until she was asleep to do it. She felt _intruded_ upon, like the cops were raiding her brain. How many more of these memories were going to be coming back? All of them? If they did, would they displace _her_ memories? If memory was the sum of a person's soul, would the Chloe she was at that moment cease to be? She'd never taken a philosophy class, but Chloe doubted it would have helped if she had.

"Chloe?"

She snapped out of it again and looked at Max, who had her worry-face on.

"When was the last time you ate?"

That was a good question.

* * *

Chloe and Max were silent as they undertook their hunt for a place to eat. They told each other that they would stop at the first place they found. Chloe knew that Max was hoping for a diner: some middle-of-nowhere piece of forgotten Americana that she could just stare at and take pictures of.

They found a McDonalds.

Chloe went to the ladies' room to wash her face as Max got their order from the bored-looking and acne-ridden teenage girl behind the front counter. Chloe stared in the mirror for a moment before she put her glasses back on. If a nineteen-year-old Chloe's memories were coming to her, would there be physical manifestations as well? Chloe doubted it, but she was petrified of the thought of her vision clearing up and her hair turning blue on its own.

Chloe left the bathroom and entered the vaguely bleach-smelling area of the franchise that the sign on the wall generously called _"the dining area."_ She saw that Max had taken a seat by the window, and that she'd ordered the biggest thing of chicken nuggets they had. A scattered cemetery of dipping sauce containers surrounded the greasy box of meat byproduct: honey for Chloe, ranch for Max.  She'd also taken upon herself to order drinks, and if her memory served, Max got herself the iced tea.  If _Max's_ memory served, then what was in the medium cup on her side of the table was the mixture of Coke, Dr. Pepper, and orange soda that Chloe had dubbed _"The Johnny Rotten."_

The interesting bit of trivia that swam forward in Chloe's mind was that she had invented that drink when she was thirteen and had called it, at the time, _"The Bella Swan,"_ and Chloe would **ritually dismember anyone who reminded her of that fact.**

"We don't come here often," Chloe said, "but you order us the nuggets every time. Since we were twelve."

Max swallowed what she had in her mouth. "The Chosen One demands nuggets," she said.

Chloe sat down. _"The Chosen One?"_

Max nodded. "According to Nathan's myth… prophecy, whatever, I'm The Girl Who Breaks the World. I went back when others could only go forward. I'm The Chosen One."

Chloe broke herself off a nugget. "You're not The Chosen One."

"I'm not?"

"No," Chloe said. "First of all, you were supposed to bring a storm that was supposed to wipe out a town. You managed to find a way around that. You can't be The Chosen One if you get to, y'know, _un-choose_ yourself. And second, you and Warren's theory about someone, like, this Jennifer Healy chick? If she's screwing with the timeline, then you can't be all that special if someone comes along five years later to do the same thing."

Max tilted her head mid-chew and became unreadable. Sensing a wrong move she might have taken, Chloe scanned her last few words for piles of shit she may have inadvertently stepped in.

"I mean, you're _special,"_ Chloe said, trying not to sound like she was backpedaling. "Just… y'know… not in that one particular way."

Max smiled and went for another nugget.

Chloe smiled as well, but the flash of memory she'd had in the courtyard came back to her. The humid air. The fireflies. Chloe had forgotten to be confused and morose for a minute.

"What's wrong?" Max asked.

Chloe put her hands on the table. "I feel like I'm going insane. Like… Like my brain is leaking out of my ears. I don't have anything to even _compare_ it to. Having memories come back like this isn't fun."

"Chloe," Max said. "I don't know what this means or how to stop it, but I promise you. I won't let anything bad happen to you."

Max's face was resolute and steely… But there was a shadow of something behind it that told Chloe something unseemly.

"You're _enjoying_ this, aren't you?"

"What?" Max asked.

_"_ _This._ You're enjoying this."

"I'm… Chloe, don't start another fight in the middle of a McDonalds."

"I'm not starting anything," Chloe said. "I'm just wondering what it is about this situation that's appealing. What was it about that week five years ago that brings this out in you?"

Max looked like she was assembling a thin miasma of emotion into legible words.

"I mean, besides me," Chloe said with a grin.

Max grinned herself before getting back to business. "That week wasn't enjoyable, really. I mean besides… But… it was _profound,_ I guess you could say. It… It told me something."

"What did it tell you?" Chloe asked.

"That I had to stop sucking."

Chloe raised her eyebrows.

"When I had my power," Max said, "I did stupid shit with it. And all the non-stupid shit I did with it, I… It was like I wasn't trying to do good. It was like I was trying to _frame_ good being done. Like the pictures I take."

Chloe tilted her head, silently imploring Max to elaborate.

"I'll give you an example," Max said.  "Alyssa Anderson?  She kept getting into accidents, getting things thrown at her head.  And I was always there to rewind time and tell her to move, and... it never dawned on me to catch any of the stuff that was getting thrown at her.  It never occurred to me step in and stop it.  That's how... devoted to being _mediocre_ I was.  Trying to engineer the perfect moment when a thing that would go wrong goes right instead. Without any input from me. But that's no way to live a life, Chloe. The only times I ever did good was when my back was against the wall and I had to save you. Or save myself. And those times, everything just… _felt right._ I want things to feel right. I want this to tell me something just as important as that week told me."

They were quiet for a moment.

"You didn't suck," said Chloe.

"Because the week I _did_ suck is locked away in another timeline."

"Well," Chloe said, "If someone else's memory serves, you saved Kate from jumping off of that roof. You couldn't have been all bad."

Max smiled. It was a smile that denoted embarrassment at the happiness she was feeling. And it broke Chloe's heart every time she saw it.

"I'm sorry," Chloe said. "About that fight we had in the car. It was unfair, and…"

"No," Max said. "You were right. I should have been upfront with you. I shouldn't have underestimated you."

"Hey, there's no telling what I would have believed. Only what I believe now. And I believe you. Every word you say."

A silence followed. As awkward as it was long. Chloe tried to see if Max was blushing. And something told her that Max was trying to see if Chloe was, too.

* * *

On the ride back to Arcadia Bay, they talked as they had in years past. Not like when they were eighteen and nineteen, scuffed by a world that was seemingly out to get them. But like when they were thirteen, and existence still seemed like a low-risk prospect. They laughed loudly, told stories, rehashed years-old gossip, sang along to the radio.

Max pulled her rental into the garage beneath the Embassy Suites, and Chloe offered to walk her up to her room; an offer that Max graciously accepted. They had smiles plastered on their faces as the elevator climbed to the fourth floor. They got to Room 412, and Max stopped and turned around.

"This is my stop," Max said.

Chloe nodded.

"You see, now I'm tempted to walk you back to your truck," Max said. "Whoda thunk? Two women trying to act gentlemanly."

"You don't have to walk me back down," Chloe said.

Max broke into an exaggerated curtsy. "But you are a _lady!"_

"Stop it!"

Max laughed, Chloe smiled, and then they just stood there for a moment. Max went in for a hug, and the tiny Max's head came up to Chloe's lips. She held her breath, and when they parted, she let it out.

Just a _little_ too loudly.

"Were you holding your breath?" Max asked.

"What?"

"Your breath. Why were you holding your breath?"

Chloe scratched her head underneath her beanie. "Well, I, Um… I breathe through my nose, and I thought that… that smelling your hair would be, um… _weird…"_

Max smiled and put her hand on her hip, and Chloe wished that _something_ would come along and save her from this punishing awkwardness.

Something did, but not in anyway she had intended, or would have liked.

Because that was the moment a bomb went off in the hotel parking lot.

At 4:33 PM, the hotel's security camera picked up a 2006 Honda Accord coming to a stop in a space far away from the other cars clustered close to the hotel's entrance. A man in a black hooded sweatshirt exited the car and left the camera's field of view. It was this car that was packed with roughly three pounds of C4 explosives near the gas tank, and a detonator that could be triggered remotely by phone.

The resulting explosion, fortunately, did not kill anyone, but it did result in massive damage to the rest of the cars in the parking lot, as well as the hotel itself, shattering the glass of the lobby entrance, as well as the windows of the first five floors.

Including the fourth floor window, from which Chloe and Max were standing not six feet away. The blast knocked both women to the floor, and Chloe instinctively crawled on top of Max, trying to shield her from whatever harm might have come next. When none came, she got up and helped Max to her feet.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Max said, getting some hair out of her eyes.

Chloe's jacket started vibrating. She reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and saw that the incoming call was private. She answered.

"Hello?"

"Howdy, Chloe," The Bull said. "I trust I have your attention."


	14. The Little Half-Sister

**Chapter 14: The Little Half-Sister**

Chloe clutched the phone to her ringing ear. "You set off a _bomb_ to get my _attention?"_

"So it worked," The Bull said. "Good."

_"_ _What the fuck is wrong with you?"_

"Little girls not doing what I tell them is what the fuck is wrong with me," The Bull said. "I _specifically fucking tell you_ not to stick your nose into other peoples' shit, and what happens? One of my boys tails you to a hotel, and not five minutes later, Denise Leonard comes out. That sounds like the opposite of what I told you to do."

"Care to comment on your relationship to Denise Leonard, and how she fits into all this?"

"Fuck you," The Bull said.

"Understand," Chloe said, not really caring that she was getting further and further on the wrong side of a violently unstable drug lord. "You and Denise come to me on the same day asking for favors. She _paid_ me. _You_ blew a cop's brains out on the floor right in front of me. Gee, I wonder which one of you two I like more."

Out of the corner her eye, Chloe saw Max with a disapproving look on her face. Chloe decided to wait until the conversation was over to address it.

_"_ _What fucking favor?"_ The Bull asked. "I ask you to do _nothing. Literally fucking nothing!_ I'm supposed to pay you to do what a potato does for _free?"_

"Bull," Chloe said. "Any other week, I'd have followed your instructions. But not this week. Not now. Not ever. All you've done is piss me off."

In truth, Chloe felt a lot more badass _before_ she said that than after. The ensuing seconds of the aftermath, during which she could hear The Bull's breathing over the phone, she teetered on the edge of panic.

"Listen here, bitch," The Bull said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "I've had my whole life to come to terms with the fact that I am one dramatic motherfucker. I _am_ the kind of man who would blow up a car to make a point. This is my second warning to stay out of my way. You will be in no position to tell a soul about my third. I will snatch your spine out through your scrawny ass, do you hear me? Don't make me show you how bad for your health fucking with me _really_ is."

And with that, The Bull hung up. Chloe put her phone back in her jacket and looked at Max.

"That was The Bull?" Max asked.

Chloe nodded.

"He sounds charming."

"He wants me to stop snooping."

"Will you?" Max asked.

Chloe looked at Max again and noticed something. She stepped towards her and reached out.

A piece of glass from the window had lodged itself in the flesh over Max's cheekbone. It wasn't a large one, no bigger in size than the tip of a ballpoint pen. Chloe gingerly removed it from Max's face. It wasn't in very deep, but she could see a small bit of blood start to bead in the wound. The mark left by the bit of glass would be gone in a day or two, but one irrefutable fact was foremost on Chloe's mind…

The Bull had spilled the blood of Max Caulfield.

Chloe hoped that the look of absolute biblical fury on her face answered Max's question.

* * *

After they had hugged a second time (and Chloe held her breath again), Chloe and Max were back in the Land of Ex-Girlfriend Weirdness. The two got on to the elevator and made their way down to the lobby to see if there was any way they could help. They found no wounded, but rather a gaggle of the hotel's guests, milling about confusedly and trying to get the ringing out of their ears.

"Walk you to The Beast?" Max asked. Considering the police would be here any minute and she wasn't feeling up to lying to them, Chloe thought that was for the best.

Chloe pulled The Beast in at the Blue Cove parking lot, waiting until her ancient truck stopped sputtering before getting out. She made her way into her apartment and, without so much as turning the lights on after she shut the apartment door, got down to nothing but the boxers she had on, leaving jacket, jeans, shirt, bra, beanie and boots on the living room floor. She walked through the darkness to her bedroom…

…and just stared at the bed, illuminated a grungy orange by the streetlight outside.

Another Chloe's memories were coming to her, and they had a way of coming in while she was dreaming. Chloe thought that laying her head on that pillow was a dangerous proposition, and the nightmare of Other Chloe's memories pushing out her own came back briefly. If only she could pick and choose. _So I have to have these new memories? Fine. I'll trade you my knowledge of all the state capitals for whatever fun times with Max I had in that other reality._

Chloe kept staring at the bed until her eyelids got too heavy for her to be afraid anymore.

* * *

_The shimmer of light and water danced on the ceiling._

_Max shed her shirt at poolside and Chloe, already in the water, drank her body in._

_The fade in Chloe's mind from Max-as-Friend to Max-as-_ More _-Than Friend was gradual to the point of being imperceptible. Her thoughts roamed along Max's body, sending Chloe's mind into a chasm of What-Ifs and How-Tos, questions and wonders of the prelude. Theories of Max's hair under her nose. Max's earlobe between her teeth. Max's thigh beneath her lips._

_And as they came, Chloe consigned them to the murky vault in which she put all shameful thoughts. She steeled herself against them like a silent, celibate monk._

I can't. Rachel's waiting for me.

_She tore her eyes away._

* * *

Chloe opened her eyes in the light of the early morning, the dream still fresh. It wasn't a nightmare, but it had left her unsettled as though it were. She threw the covers back and put her feet down on the floor.

She felt old. Wizened. She was a twenty-four year old woman with the regrets of someone in their fifties.

Over the past couple of days, Chloe had resigned herself to the fact that the existence of the universe was not an undeviating straight line, but rather a bloom with unruly petals jutting out at odd directions. A coin coming up heads here would come up tails in another reality. Those who go left go right elsewhere.

But in every universe, in every timeline, Chloe Price would fall in love with Max Caulfield.

And in every timeline, it would be fate, circumstance, coincidence, the weather, or Chloe herself that would find a way to fuck it up.

_I can't win 'em all,_ Chloe thought. _But can't I win just one?_

Whatever calamity befell her in timelines unknown, it pressed down on Chloe that she was in the last universe standing, and death and storms couldn't break up Chloe and Max, but _she_ could. All the sacrifices and turmoil were for nothing, as Chloe left Max without saying a word because…

Chloe didn't want to think about it, didn't want to justify her walking out to herself, under the towering fear that her reasoning would collapse, and she'd feel more like an asshole than she already did.

Chloe finally got up to find her phone and call the woman who made her so, so happy and so, so sad.

* * *

"Last night you said someone was shot in front of you," Max said.

Chloe called Max and they met at the Two Whales. After breakfast (and more dirty stares from Vivian), the first order of business, they decided, was to check out the house of Margarita Newman, Justin's mysterious brunette girlfriend.

They were on their way there now.

"What?"

"On the phone with The Bull last night," Max said. "You said he shot someone in front of you? A _cop?"_

"Well," Chloe said, "it was a dirty cop, if it makes you feel any better."

"It doesn't," Max said. "Good Lord, I'm so sorry. How did you hold up after that?"

"I think you'd have held up better. Didn't you see me get _my_ head blown off in the other reality? You'd have handled this dude's head exploding like a champ."

"Don't sound so impressed when you say that," Max said. "Kinda the worst day of my life."

"I will say this, though. I'd rather have nightmares about Detective Finch getting capped than the dreams I've _been_ having."

"Did you have another one last night?" Max asked. "Another memory?"

Chloe felt a twinge inside her. It… was not altogether wholesome.

"I'll tell you about it later," Chloe said.

They pulled up to the address for Margarita Newman that Max found. It was called Renoir Court, and was an entire suburban block that consisted of one main house up front and five smaller houses in the back, no bigger than mobile homes. According to the address, Margarita Newman lived in one of the smaller houses.

"What's the relation between Margarita Newman and Jennifer Healy?" Chloe asked. "There are pictures of the two of them on Instagram, but, what, are they friends? Related?"

"Pic _ture,"_ Max said. _"Singular._ And I don't know. All of Jennifer Healy's accounts are set to private. We're just going off of one picture. The connection might be thin, but there's no way of knowing until we ask her."

They knocked on the door of House 3, which was shedding white paint chips like a Chihuahua shed fleas. There was no answer. Chloe and Max looked at each other.

"Landlord?"

"Landlord."

Land _lady,_ as it turned out. She looked to be in her late sixties, by Chloe's estimation, with thick glasses and thin white hair. The fact that Christmas was well over a month away didn't stop her from having a thick Christmas sweater on. She didn't move from the frame of the front door of the main house.

"Who are you?" asked the Landlady.

Chloe closed her eyes and took a quick breath. _Let's hope this doesn't sound as stupid out loud as it does in my head._

"Ma'am," Chloe said, "I'm a private investigator, and I was hoping to speak to Margarita Newman about her boyfriend's death? His name's Justin Williams, I don't know if you know him…"

"I met him," The Landlady said. "Who hired you?"

"You know, the word _'private'_ is just as important as the word _'investigator.'_ I wouldn't be at liberty to say."

The Landlady shrugged.

"You wouldn't happen to know where Margarita is, or when she'd be back?"

"She's on vacation," The Landlady said.

Chloe and Max looked at each other. "Really?" Chloe asked. "Does she know her boyfriend's dead?"

"Damned if I know," The Landlady said. "She's been gone a week. Left a note and paid her rent a month in advance. In cash, too."

"I see," Chloe said. "Would it be alright if I saw this note?"

The Landlady silently damned Chloe with her eyes as she trudged into the house to look for the note. Max looked at Chloe and grinned.

_"'_ _Private investigator?'"_

"I… It… _Your freckles are dumb!"_

Max laughed.

The Landlady returned a moment later, note from Margarita in hand. Chloe looked it over, and… it said exactly what The Landlady said it did. Although Chloe found it curious that the letter didn't say _where_ Margarita was vacationing to.

"Thank you," Chloe said. "Do you mind if we have a look around Margarita's house? It's not like we could take anything. You know what we look like and it's not as though we're hard to spot."

The Landlady looked Chloe up and down. "I run a respectable place, here," The Landlady said. "I don't let anyone have their way around my residents' homes."

Chloe fished two of Lenny Diehl's fifties out of her jacket pocket and held them out to The Landlady.

"Lucky me," Chloe said. "I'm not just anyone."

* * *

Inside the small confines of Margarita Newman's house, Chloe took the bedroom on the right, Max took the living room on the left, and they agreed to search their way to the middle. Both were very conscious of the fact that what they were doing was _very_ illegal, and tried to put everything back as best they could when they were done.

Chloe's search of the bedroom wasn't bringing her the success she wanted. Nothing was in any of the drawers or under the bed. The only pictures she found were copies of those in Justin's hallway.

Chloe called out to Max. "Find anything?"

"I found her laptop… _Fuck,_ it's password-protected."

Chloe went into the living room. Her intentions to say something to Max were stifled by the green leather-bound photo album that she spotted on the entertainment center underneath the TV.

"You check this yet?" Chloe asked. Max looked up and shook her head.

It only took two page-flips for Chloe to find sweet, delicious paydirt.

"Max!" Chloe said. "Get over here!" Max did so.

Not only had Margarita Newman known Jennifer Healy, they'd known each other for _years._ Little wonder as Margarita and Jennifer were all over the album, in a variety of Christmas pictures, birthday celebrations, family vacations…

"They're _related,"_ Max said. "They could be sisters."

"With different last names?" Chloe asked.

_"_ _Half-_ sisters, maybe? There's only one set of parents in these photos. That kinda leaves out any aunts or uncles for them to be cousins."

Chloe rubbed the back of her beanie up and down, hoping the friction would scratch the back of her head.

"It doesn't make any sense," Chloe said. "Her boyfriend's dead, her half-sister's missing for _how long?"_

"A month, according to the flyer we got at Blackwell."

"And she decides to go on vacation?"

Something occurred to Chloe. It wasn't a pleasant something. She stormed to the kitchen. Max put down the photo album and followed her.

On the refrigerator door was a grocery list, reminding its writer of their need for milk, flour, double-A batteries and baby oil. Chloe took the vacation letter she had gotten from The Landlady and held it up next to the grocery list.

"Wowser," Max said as she looked the two piece of writing over.

"Yup," Chloe said. "Different handwriting." Chloe held the vacation letter up in front of Max.

"Someone else wrote this letter and gave cash to The Landlady to make her think Margarita Newman was on vacation."

"But she isn't," Max said.

"No. Margarita was _taken._ And if _she_ was taken, so was Jennifer Healy. It's the only thing that makes sense."

Max looked at her shoes and sighed. "Can't we get a mystery where things get _less_ complicated?"


	15. Recollections of American Rust

**Chapter 15: Recollections of American Rust**

_October 7, 2013_

Outside the hospital room where Max Caulfield lie comatose, Ryan and Vanessa Caulfield talked with Joyce and David Madsen. Chloe Price, still shaken from her and Max's brush with death, stood against the wall observing them. She tuned out _what_ they were saying, and instead focused on _how_ they were saying it.

It was an easy task to read her mother: She felt guilty. Guilty about the fact that the daughter of the two people she was talking to might have been dying in the other room for the sake of her own daughter, which just made her feel even guiltier. That her daughter's continued existence could have resulted in another daughter's demise.

Ryan Caulfield was trying his best to keep his head above water. Chloe didn't figure that having a child clinging to life did anyone any favors, and Chloe couldn't imagine herself handling the situation with a shred of dignity. But Ryan, bless his heart, was trying to function as best he could. He smiled when he saw Joyce, shook David's hand (as this was the first time the Caulfields had ever met him), and even complimented Chloe on her blue hair.

David was… David. His fist was clenched against his lips, his beady eyes hawk-like as he watched everyone's lips move. He occasionally spared Chloe glances that had no emotion behind them. Or at least no emotion that Chloe could detect.

Vanessa Caulfield was in clear shock. Chloe remembered reading that just because a coma patient opened their eyes or blurted out a non-sequitur, it didn't mean that they could see you or knew what was coming out of their own mouths. Chloe figured that that was the state Vanessa was in now: Eyes wide and mouth moving while still in a thick integument that was holding back grief for a daughter who wasn't dead yet.

A quick and brutal image of Max's eyes raising uncomprehendingly, staring at Chloe but not _seeing_ her, flashed in her mind. It took her physically shaking her head to banish it.

"Um…" Chloe said. "I'm gonna go home. I mean if…"

"Do you need me to walk you to your truck?" Joyce asked.

"No," Chloe said. "Thanks Mom, but I'm… I'm fine."

A fresh round of hugs for the four of them. Even David managed to put some stank on his. Chloe made her way down the hallway to the door.

Under the streetlight in the parking lot, she leaned against her truck, puffing away at a Parliament Light. She took the cigarette out of her mouth and regarded it.

_These things are supposed to kill you._

Chloe's best friend from when she was a kid made a grand entrance after five years of silence and took a bullet for her, and she was digging her own grave one puff of a smoke at a time.

Eh, she'd quit tomorrow.

Chloe had squished the butt under her boot when her phone started vibrating. She took it out of her jacket and saw that it was Rachel's mom.

"Hello?" Chloe asked.

"Um…" Lucinda Amber said. "Hello, Chloe. I… I saw on the news… are you okay?"

"Yeah," Chloe said. "I'm fine, I'm… everything's fine. It's just been…"

Chloe's words were halted in their tracks by the sound of whimpering on the other line. Rachel's mom was crying.

"What's wrong?" Chloe asked.

"It's Rachel," Lucinda Amber said, crying. "She's _gone…"_

* * *

_November 7, 2018_

"So what's the new memory?" Max asked as she drove.

Chloe came back from space. "What?"

"You said you had a memory come back to you last night," Max said. "Which one was it?"

Yet another unwholesome twinge within Chloe. _Stop that!_

"Um… well…" Chloe trailed off.

"It was the kiss, wasn't it?" Max asked.

"What kiss?"

"Oh," Max said. "Never mind."

"Actually," Chloe said, "it was the pool."

A hush fell over the car.

"What _specifically_ is it about the pool that's throwing salt in your game?" Max asked. "I mean, you've been a little off since this morning."

"I… I really don't want to make things weird between us."

"Oh," Max said. Another hush.

"Chloe?"

"Yeah?"

_"_ _Make it weird."_

Chloe looked at Max. "What?"

"I know," Max said. "I'm sorry. This is a tough time for you. You're having an existential crisis. But I've been wondering about that night for _five years."_

Chloe wanted to defuse this situation. She looked around for whatever could do it, and she found a box marked _"_ _Guilt."_

"So the memories _we_ had aren't good enough? You're curious about _another_ Chloe's memories?"

Max was either oblivious to Chloe's attempts to guilt her out, or she maneuvered around them with the grace of a ballerina.

"Chloe, on my _deathbed,_ I will treasure the times we had together in _this_ reality. The prom, the Gum Wall in Seattle, all those times you put your cigarettes in the mouth of the Jimi Hendrix statue? But just because these memories didn't happen to you _per se,_ doesn't mean they didn't happen to _me._ They're my memories too. Humor me, please, tell me about the pool."

Chloe's mouth opened and closed like an indecisive fish. "I just don't think its appropriate…"

Max stopped her right there. "Remember Halloween 2014? I dressed as Link. You had on this… this black suit and black shirt with, like, a red tie and aviator shades. You were, what, _Sexy Jim Sterling?"_

Chloe threw up her hands. "I was _Paul Ellering,"_ Chloe said. "What did they teach you in history class?"

"The point is," Max said, "that when we got home, you took off my Link costume, from my cap to my boots, with your _teeth._ And now you're gonna sit there and tell me that, when we're in the middle of a murder mystery with time travel and drug lords and explosions, you're gonna be _polite?_ Tell me about the pool, please."

Chloe took a deep breath.

"That night," Chloe said, "was probably the first time I thought of you… _that way."_

Max nodded. "Like, _romantically?_ Or…"

"If I know myself as well as I think I do, I'd probably thought of you romantically _before_ then. Even if it was hypothetical. Like, _'_ _Oh, that girl's pretty, I wonder what it would be like to date her.'_ But at the pool, I was thinking… other things."

"Oh," Max said. _"_ _Those_ other things… But you didn't act on it."

Chloe looked at Max again.

"Okay," Chloe said. "Your turn. What would you have done if I _had?"_

Max shrugged. "I don't know. I hadn't even _kissed_ anyone up to that point. But in hindsight, I guess there really was only one way of finding out."

A brief lull. "So why didn't you act on it?" Max asked.

Chloe sighed. "Because I was still holding out hope that Rachel was still alive. And if I made a move on you… then that would have been like admitting that she was gone."

Chloe looked at Max and saw that she blinked a few times.

"Oh," Max said. "I, um… I should _really_ be careful what I ask about… I'm sorry."

* * *

Near the highway leading out of Arcadia Bay, an expanse of trees had been cleared. In this flat expanse, a square about the size of a city block was fenced in. It was paved and dotted with storage sheds the size of small garages.

Big Bob's Storage.

Chloe and Max made their way down the rows of sheds, the sounds their shoes made their only company.

"Our police department has to store their evidence in a shitty storage shed on the edge of town," Chloe said. "I'd love to live in a place this jank that _isn't_ Arcadia Bay. Just to see what it would be like."

"I dunno," Max said. "The jank lends it an air of charm. It's like the _Deadly Premonition_ of towns."

They found shed 211, and Chloe got out the key that Denise had given her the morning before, and unlocked the heavy door to the shed. She needed Max's help to get it open.

A light came on automatically. On the bare pavement that passed for a floor, there were eight boxes that were lined up in two rows of four. Chloe took the four on the right and Max took the four on the left. They both sat down on the cold pavement and started rooting through the police evidence in the shooting of Arnold Trainor, hoping to find clues to at least one of the many mysteries that Chloe and Max had fallen ass-backwards into.

The first clue didn't take long.

"Wowser," Max said.

Chloe looked at her. "Y'know, for as many clues we find, would it kill you to say _'_ _Jinkies'_ at least _once?"_

Max took a clip-on ID badge out of the first box she had gone through and handed it to Chloe.

Chloe found it funny that, for as much mental space that Trainor took up as _"_ _The Guy Somebody Hired to Kill Justin,"_ she had had no idea what the man even looked like until now. Arnold Trainor appeared to be in his late thirties, far too young for the comb-over atop his head that fate had cursed him with. His hazel eyes were buggy and his chin came down to a point. He looked like the pre-alpha version of the guy in the slasher movies who warns the desperately horny co-eds to stay away from the abandoned summer camp.

But the interesting part was where Trainor worked.

"Leonard International," Chloe said. "Arnold Trainor worked for Leonard International."

"Don't a lot of people work for Leonard International?" Max asked.

"Yeah, but this ID badge says he was an _'_ _Executive Shipping Coordinator.'"_

"Sounds important," Max said.

"Yeah," Chloe said. _"_ _Too_ important. Trevor told me that Trainor had a long list of priors. How the hell does an ex-con get that high up at Leonard International? I'll ask Denise about it the next time I see her."

"When will that be?" Max asked. Only jealous people actively try not to look jealous.

Chloe tilted her head. "One thing at a time, Max."

The second clue was in Chloe's third box. _"_ _Boom!"_

"What?" Max asked.

Chloe took a coffee cup out of the box and walked it over to Max. But this was no ordinary coffee cup, no, it was one of those one gets at the mall, where one can have a photo screened on the side. Which particular photo was screened on this particular coffee cup was of paramount interest to both Chloe and Max. The photo depicted Arnold Trainor at its center, with his arm around the neck of another man, and yet a third man behind them, giving Trainor bunny-ears and smiling a shit-eating smile.

Chloe informed Max that the guy Trainor had his arm around was The Bull.

And she didn't need to tell Max who the smiling man giving Trainor bunny-ears was.

 _"_ _Logan?"_ Max damn near yelled.

Logan Robertson, the one-time pride of the Blackwell Bigfoots (and the one-time baby-daddy of Dana Ward) was in a picture on the side of a coffee mug with a ruthless drug kingpin and the murderer of one of his classmates.

"I guess our next stop is that shitty car wash Logan works at," Chloe said. "But fuck, I guess Trainor and The Bull were tight… which makes a lot of sense."

"How so?" Max asked.

"Well, Denise hired me to see if The Bull hired Trainor to kill Justin, because The Bull is dealing drugs jacked from Leonard International shipments. Being that Trainor works high up at Leonard International…"

"Then Trainor is the one telling The Bull which shipments have drugs on them," Max said. "Or he was. But if Trainor and The Bull were friends, then why did Trainor end up dead after he killed Justin?"

"I don't know," Chloe said. "Let's keep digging."

The next bit of interest was found by Max.

"It's a flip phone," Max said.

Chloe's eyes lit up. _"_ _It's the burner phone!"_ she said. "Give it here!"

Max did so. "What's a burner phone?"

"It's a disposable phone. Trevor said only two calls were made with it. One was to the ABPD to get me arrested when I went into Justin's house. Another was to a number they weren't able to trace."

"And… you think _we_ can trace it?"

"This was before I learned that both The Bull _and_ Denise had a shitload of cops in their pockets. Which means either they weren't able to trace the number, or one of these dirty cops didn't _want_ it traced."

The phone didn't have any battery life left, so Chloe would have to look at the number after she had charged it herself.

The final clue was found by Chloe, at the bottom of the last box of her four.

"Ohhhhh," Chloe said, groaning. "Oh, Jesus."

Max came around, and her face looked like how Chloe felt.

Fourteen photographs. All of Jennifer Healy. Chloe knew that they were taken on consecutive days, because the photos had been dated in red pen on their margins. Each photo was dated after Jennifer was reported missing. In each photo, she was standing in front of a white wall next to a table. In each photo she was dressed in very nice skirts, slacks, blouses, dresses. In each photo, the red digital clock on the table read **_11:59 PM._** And in each photo she had an absent, glassy stare.

"Look," Chloe said, and pointed at Jennifer's arm in one of the photographs. It was lined with red dots.

"Track-marks. She's being drugged," Max said, and Chloe saw her suppress a shudder. Chloe thought that there might be a story there, but she didn't want to ask.

"I don't want to think about this right now," Chloe said. "I don't want to do _anything_ right now. Let's just take the stuff we can use and go."

Max took the ID badge and the coffee mug. Chloe took the Jennifer Healy photos and the burner phone. The two slammed the shed door back down to the…

* * *

_Damp soil._

_An ungodly reek._

_Desperation._

_Horror._

_Sunlight dancing off the plastic of a body bag as it's unearthed from the dirt._

"Rachel?"

* * *

Chloe fell to her knees.

"Chloe? What's wrong?"

Chloe clawed her glasses off of her face, and a howl of grief and despair tore its way out of her throat. She dropped the photos of Jennifer Healy, and the November wind lightly arrayed them in front of her. Chloe's lips pulled back. Chloe's eyes streamed tears through clenched eyelids. Chloe could feel her face turning red as another wail came.

The world had gone away, replaced with a cold, red endlessness. The only thing she could feel were the arms Max wrapped around her.

"It's okay, Chloe! I'm here! I've got you!"

Chloe opened her eyes, and she saw that one of her tears fell on one of the pictures of Jennifer Healy at her knees. And whether her tears distorted her vision or her mind was leaving her, Chloe could have sworn that the face of Jennifer Healy started mixing perfectly with the face of Rachel Amber.

_"_ _What kind of a world does this?"_

* * *

They sat in Max's rental in the silent parking lot. Chloe's face was still red, and Max's eyes were pleading for an order, for any suggestion of a feat she could perform that could take Chloe's pain away.

"It was Rachel, wasn't it?" Max asked. "You got a memory of finding Rachel in the junkyard."

Chloe took her beanie off and nodded. "It happened five years ago, but it felt _fresh,_ and…"

Chloe couldn't find the words, and punched the dashboard instead. Max jumped.

"I know people step on other people to get ahead," Chloe said. "To feel better about themselves. I don't like it, but I've accepted the fact that I can't stop it… But have you ever noticed that the world likes breaking little girls the most? Jennifer Healy is a little girl. Rachel _was_ a little girl."

"Chloe…"

 _"_ _She was eighteen years old, Max!_ I couldn't have seen it like this back then, but I see it _now._ Rachel was a _child."_

Chloe threw her beanie onto the dashboard. A fresh round of silent tears came.

"She was a good girl," Chloe said, her voice soft. "They killed her for it… And she thought the world was a decent place. She thought everything was gonna be okay…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, but no one's reading this story. When I see stories with just one chapter that have more hits and kudos than mine does at fifteen, it tells me that I'm selling something people aren't buying. It just feels like I'm embarrassing myself. 
> 
> I'll leave it on the site, so the few readers I do have aren't confused about the situation, but this one's getting orphaned. Sorry to disappoint any of you. Myself included.
> 
> For the relative few of you that care, the remaining eight chapters are available at FF-Dot-Net. I hope you enjoy them.


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